The next terrifying war: Israel v Hizbullah

A war is looming in Lebanon. For months Israel and Hizbullah, an Iranian-armed Shia militia, have traded drones, rockets and missiles (see charts). Northern Israel has been blasted and depopulated: 70,000 people have been displaced. More have left southern Lebanon. On July 3rd Israel killed a senior Hizbullah commander; the group responded with a heavy rocket barrage. Several countries, including America, are telling their citizens to leave Lebanon. Israel’s leaders talk of war as though it is inevitable. It would be the most intense conflict in the region in decades—a calamity for Israel and a disaster for Lebanon.

There are still ways out. American and European diplomats continue to shuttle between Israel and Lebanon, hoping, with less and less optimism, to get Hizbullah to withdraw 7-10km away from the border. On July 2nd the group said it would stop firing if there was a truce in Gaza. Even then, the result would be a tenuous peace, with the threat of cross-border raids by Hizbullah dissuading many Israelis from returning.

If Israel decides to launch a war to weaken Hizbullah and push it north, it might involve a limited ground invasion of southern Lebanon, an area that it occupied until 2000. That alone would be a major military undertaking. In 2006, when the two sides fought a 34-day war, Hizbullah squads used hundreds of anti-tank weapons to blunt Israeli armoured assaults, shocking the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

In the 18 years since, both sides have learnt from that experience. In 2006 the Israeli Air Force (IAF) attacked about 100 targets a day. Now, officers boast, they could hit over 3,000. Hizbullah has been weakened over the past nine months; it has lost nearly 400 fighters and much of its military infrastructure in the south. Iran does not believe the group is ready for a big war, say people in Western intelligence.

Others in the IDF warn of complacency. Hizbullah is far better prepared for an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon than Ukraine was against Russia in February 2022, says an officer who has studied the Lebanese group. The IDF would advance, but probably more slowly and at far higher cost than in the last war. Hizbullah will probably “absorb the shock”, says Khalil Helou, a retired Lebanese general, before striking Israel’s flanks and rear with “guerrilla tactics”, including from an extensive tunnel network, built with help from North Korea.

There have been four big changes since 2006. One is that Hizbullah has acquired a wide range of Iranian-designed kamikaze drones. Many of the IDF’s tanks and armoured vehicles now have active-protection systems that can counter anti-tank missiles. But the drones target weaker points on the top of vehicles.

The second change is the development of Hizbullah’s ground forces. After 2006, younger Hizbullah fighters, observing both Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Islamic State in Syria’s civil war, argued that their own leaders depended too much on fixed fortifications, which could be struck or bypassed. The response was to build up its elite Radwan force, intended to strike as far as 20km into Israel. Third, the group’s experience fighting in Syria alongside the Russian air force taught it the value of more and heavier explosive warheads.

Finally, that firepower has also become more accurate. Hizbullah now routinely uses small quadcopters to identify immediate targets for rockets. It has also been sending reconnaissance drones to identify targets and, one or two days later, strike drones to attack them “very accurately”, says the officer. Positions that the idf once thought were well camouflaged have repeatedly been found and hit, he says. “The only reason we don’t have huge casualties in the north,” he adds, “is that our forces remain out of sight.” If the IDF had to go on the offensive, that would change.

Then there is the matter of scale. Israeli generals talk optimistically of a limited ground manoeuvre to capture a “security zone” to prevent Hizbullah from firing on Israeli border villages. In 1982 the IDF needed seven divisions to invade Lebanon. Four divisions were used in the smaller war of 2006. At present, the IDF is stretched thin in Gaza and the West Bank. At least one of the units sent to training bases in the north for exercises has been sent back to Gaza. “I don’t see where they’re going to bring enough soldiers from,” says one reservist who took part in those drills.

The ground war is only half the problem. Even before Israeli troops cross the border, Israel will almost certainly launch air strikes with the aim of eliminating as many of Hizbullah’s missile launchers and stockpiles as it can. Civilian casualties are inevitable: many of the launchers are in villages. It will also lead to further escalation, as Hizbullah will have an incentive to launch its missiles towards central Israel before they are destroyed. If that occurs, Israel is likely to escalate with another two steps: striking political targets such as Hizbullah’s headquarters in cities; and hitting Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.

For now, Hizbullah’s rocket strikes are largely confined to military targets in northern Israel. In the event of a ground invasion of Lebanon, it would probably expand the scope and intensity of that campaign. In 2006 the group had around 15,000 rockets and missiles, most of them unguided with a range of less than 20km, well short of reaching the northern Israeli city of Haifa. It fired around 120 a day, killing 53 Israelis and damaging 2,000 buildings. The next war will be far more intense. Hizbullah now has more than 120,000 rockets and missiles. Many could reach Tel Aviv and beyond with precision guidance.

The effects are described in an unpublished report by over 100 experts and Israeli former officials convened by Reichman University in Herzliya and finalised in October. It warns that Hizbullah might fire 2,500 to 3,000 missiles a day, 25 times the rate of 2006, for three weeks running. That would be the largest sustained missile barrage in history. Even if American destroyers offshore were to take out larger missiles, some of Israel’s defences would be swamped, resulting in heavy casualties. Some estimates say tens of thousands.

Reality dawns

The Israeli public is beginning to grapple with what it would mean, in practice, to face that volume of missiles. On June 20th Shaul Goldstein, the head of Noga, a government-owned power company, cautioned that Hizbullah strikes on the power grid could have devastating consequences. “The bottom line is that after 72 hours, it is impossible to live in Israel,” he said. “We are not ready for a real war. We live in a fantasy world.” Israel’s energy minister hit back, insisting that long blackouts were “an extreme scenario with low probability”.

Undoubtedly the IDF would seek to curb the missile threat by tackling the problem on the ground. It has already begun doing so. In February and in May the IAF attacked buildings in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley identified as guided-missile production sites. Depots and launchers are much harder to find and hit, however. Since January Hizbullah has moved many of its most important weapons out of the south to the Bekaa Valley and Faraya, a mountainous region, says another Western intelligence source, making them even harder to target. Its air defences have also improved, which might limit the IAF’s freedom of manoeuvre: the group has shot down seven large Israeli drones since October 7th.

If Israel cannot stop the missiles before they launch, it will rely on deterrence by punishment. Should it be forced into a war with Hizbullah, Israel’s aims, writes Yitzhak Gershon, who was deputy commander of Israel’s northern command in recent months, will be “to destroy the state of Lebanon to its foundations”. Gaza would look like “paradise in comparison”, he adds. “It is important for me to make it clear to our enemies,” declared Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy and infrastructure minister, on June 20th. “If there is a power outage lasting for hours [in Israel], in Lebanon there will be a power outage for months.” Mr Helou retorts that Lebanon’s infrastructure is already in such a dreadful condition that this might hardly be a deterrent.

At the outset of a war each side will also have to make tricky judgments over how far their patrons will back them. Israel is confident that America will provide a degree of air and missile defence, as it did against an Iranian barrage in April. What is less certain is whether it would play any offensive role, for instance striking coastal missile batteries that target warships.

Iran wants to avoid a direct clash with America or Israel. It would almost certainly encourage drone and missile attacks by proxy forces in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Israeli assessments also suggest that Iran might intervene directly, probably through long-range missile strikes, if Israel were to target Hizbullah’s leadership.

The point of any war for Israel would ultimately be to remove the sense of dread hanging over northern Israel that is preventing citizens from returning. After Hamas’s attacks of October 7th Israel cannot tolerate the notion of such a threat on its borders. But Israeli experts are sceptical that this is presently achievable at acceptable cost. The army is tired from Gaza and needs at least six months to prepare for another war and to let its political leaders repair their ties with America and other allies, says a veteran Mossad bigwig. That is one reason why he, like so many other ex-spooks and generals, wants a deal.

The IDF could create a 10km buffer zone in Lebanon, suggests Tamir Hayman, a recent Israeli military-intelligence chief. But the result would be an exhausting war of attrition, much like the one it waged through the 1990s. “If you want to create a change, you need to destroy all of [Hizbullah’s] system,” he says. “And right now I think it cannot be achieved.”

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