October 1, 2024 | The Dispatch
The Contest of Wills Between Israel and Hezbollah
The militant group’s miscalculations have left it with no good options in Lebanon.
October 1, 2024 | The Dispatch
The Contest of Wills Between Israel and Hezbollah
The militant group’s miscalculations have left it with no good options in Lebanon.
Excerpt
Diplomacy, no matter how persistent, cannot end Hezbollah’s threat to northern Israel. Even the elimination of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah won’t suffice. Only a ground operation will.
Israel significantly intensified its campaign against Hezbollah these past two weeks—including detonating thousands of the group’s telecommunications devices, wiping out its elite military and top political leadership, launching an aerial blitz against 1,600 targets in one day, all in rapid succession. This pain had a purpose. The Israelis had just updated their war aims to include safely returning their displaced citizens to their homes in the north. They could do that only by forcing Hezbollah to decouple potential Lebanon and Gaza ceasefires and retreat from the border.
David Daoud is a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ahmad Sharawi is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.