Everyone is biting off more than they can chew...
Like the Houthis hunkered down in Yemen, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah have been firing across Israel’s northern border in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. Unlike the Houthis they been launching rockets almost daily since 8 October. Israel has been responding in kind, both sides of the border have been pummeled and no one who can help it lives there. The whole thing has remained a sort of tit-for-tat exchange held in place by careful applied red lines to prevent a total war.
Israeli intelligence is better than Hezbollah’s, and about two dozen of the Hezbollah’s top militia’s commanders have been targeted and killed since the fighting started. Israel launched a strike that killed four Hezbollah members last Friday. In return, Hezbollah announced, and then launched, a dozen missiles in response. And the tit-for-tat likely would have continued in its slow drip of violence had one of Hezbollah’s Iranian-made rockets not hit a soccer pitch in the Golan Heights – killing a dozen teens in the local Druze community. Despite the announcement, Hezbollah denies the strike. So does Iran, who made and supplied the weapon.
Meanwhile in Washington, Benyamin Netanyahu was sounding very American when he promised not to stop until “total victory” was achieved. He had to cut his trip short to return home. Sadly, total defeat of Hamas is a check that the IDF can’t really cash, as the Gaza War against Hamas has petered from an active war into a counter-insurgency: Less glamorous, more exhausting and drawn out.
T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” put it best when he described counter-insurgency operations as “eating soup with a knife.” It involves a lot of taking by day as the enemy melts into the local population, only to have them come up from tunnels and take it back every night. Here that pipeline to US weapons really isn’t going to make much of a difference, nor its expertise in counter-insurgency: cite Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the manageable tit-for-tat in the north is widening. On Tuesday, Israel struck at Hezbollah stronghold in a suburb of Beirut that targeted and killed Fuad Shukr, “the commander responsible” for Golan Heights strike. Now the world is waiting on Hezbollah’s crucial reaction: a more symbolic reaction to save face and return to the red lines might avert a wider war. However, the militia is sitting on a stockpile of anywhere between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles. That is well enough to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome defenses and send Israelis into bunkers for weeks, but only at a cost of getting flattened itself.
In the quieter backchannels – in this case the Sky News Arabia – it was explained that while the IDF will “respond forcefully” to reestablish deterrence and redraw red-lines, but “We don’t intend to start a war.” The IDF has neither the manpower or the munitions for two fronts and even Tehran seemed to thinking that it had bitten off more than it can chew.
The killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas overall political leader in Tehran for the presidential election, may change the calculus. Tehran gets worked up about these assassinations, and it may push Hezbollah, Hamas and even the Houhtis to ramp things up. Or act itself. This would put into action the war-plan the hardliners within the IRGC sketched out years ago: that a long war of attrition for Israel – used to short wars – will cause the country to simply collapse.
In other news, the US Navy’s Wasp Amphibious Ready Group, that has been in the Mediterranean Sea for a month, and moved from Malta, to Cyprus, closer to Lebanon and Israel.
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