After Hezbollah and Israel trade fire in retaliatory strikes, a return to an uneasy status quo

BEIRUT — It appears the Middle East has inched back from the precipice of a larger conflict after the Israeli military and Lebanese Hezbollah traded significant fire Sunday, but experts told Breaking Defense clashes are likely to continue as they did before.

In the last 24 hours Israel launched a series of strikes on what it said were Hezbollah targets, ahead of a wave of attacks by Hezbollah against what it said were Israeli military targets, involving scores of missiles and drones. The Hezbollah strike was the long-anticipated response to Israel’s killing of a senior member of the group, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut one month ago.

Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Sunday that the primary target of the attack was Glilot military base and the secondary target was Ein Shemer air defense base.

“We targeted the Glilot military intelligence base near Tel Aviv, around 110 kilometers from Lebanon’s border,” he said in his speech about the operation dubbed as “Operation Arbaeen Day,” a reference to an important figure in Islam.

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He claimed that Glilot base “houses Unit 8200, which specializes in intelligence gathering, eavesdropping, and espionage.” (Unit 8200 has been compared to America’s powerful National Security Agency signals intelligence organization.)

“Our data suggests that a substantial number of drones successfully reached the two specified targets,” Nasrallah said.

No statements or footage of attacks on any of the two military sites was issued, and the Israeli military denied any damage at its bases.

An hour before Hezbollah’s attack, Israel launched what it called preemptive strikes on around 40 launching sites in Lebanon and claimed significant success — but in that case Nasrallah, as well, claimed that no launcher was hit before the attack was completed. Three people were killed in Israel’s strikes, and one Israeli soldier died in the Hezbollah attack, according to media reports.

That both sides claimed their operations were successful and appear to have stood down, at least comparatively, suggests that the exchange was more of a political show of force than anything, analysts told Breaking Defense.

“The retaliation served a political purpose rather than an operational one: no major damage was inflicted on Israel, Hezbollah insisted it targeted military sites in order to prevent bigger escalation from Israel (hence also the use of short-range missiles and drones),” said Jean Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute.

He added that it’s hard to assess how much the Israeli preemptive strikes might have degraded the firepower Hezbollah was going to employ.

Samaan said, however, that if Hezbollah “decided to respond mostly for the optics,” it could risk “being derided on social networks as ‘losing the game of chicken’ with Israel,” and pushing it to continue with another wave of attacks.

Retired Lebanese Armed Forces Gen. Maroun Hitti said he expected Hezbollah had done what it felt was necessary and predicted the conflict to return to its status quo as a relatively low-level conflict.

“Now, we are back to the initial posture, depicted by Israel’s desired end state which is the return of the inhabitants of the north safely, and they can’t do that without the full implementation of 1701 and this time couple with 1559,” Hitti told Breaking Defense, referring to United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Lebanese sovereignty. The 1701 resolution was issued to end a month-long war in 2006 and called for the deployment of 15,000 Lebanese armed forces personnel along the southern border. The 1559 resolution stipulates the disarmament of militias in Lebanon as a measure “necessary to save” the country.

Two other retired Lebanese generals, Wehbe Katicha and Khalil Helou, agreed that Hezbollah’s strike was meant to help avoid an all-out war.

“Hezbollah doesn’t want to escalate. That’s why they didn’t launch any of the long-range missiles in the arsenal,” Katicha said.

Both sides did, however, leave open the possibility for further aggression. Sounding not unlike Nasrallah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel’s strikes were “not the final word.” He stressed that “this is another step towards changing the situation in the north and safely returning our residents to their homes.”

And one major question remains hanging in the air: What will Iran do? Around the same time Israel killed Shukr, it is alleged to have taken out a senior Hamas leader in Tehran. It, too, has promised retaliation, but so far does not appear to have acted.

“But I think right now, the big unknown is Iran: is Tehran satisfied or not, given the killing of Haniyeh in Tehran last month?” Samaan asked. “They may be considering another wave of attacks, perhaps from another front” whether from Syria, Iraq or using the Houthis from Yemen.