Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia has largely refrained from firing rockets at central Israel after a week of suffering the worst blows in its 11-month conflict with the nation, some observers say, as the group grapples with external pressures and its desire to keep the fighting at a low level.
In the eight days since Hezbollah began seeing thousands of its communications devices explode in attacks it blamed on Israel, followed by Israeli airstrikes that eliminated more of its senior commanders, the group has fired only one of its most powerful weapons at Israel’s heavily populated center.
Hezbollah fired what it said was a ballistic missile toward Tel Aviv early Wednesday, in what the Israeli military described as the first such attack by the U.S.-designated terror group. Israel said that it had successfully intercepted the missile and that no damage had been done.
Since its last war with Israel in 2006, the Iran-backed militia has built an arsenal of about 150,000 rockets and other projectiles, some capable of hitting anywhere in Israel, said Matthew Levitt, counterterrorism program director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, citing Israeli estimates.
In an interview for the Wednesday edition of VOA’s “Flashpoint” program, Levitt said one factor mitigating Hezbollah’s use of its longest-range and most powerful missiles was the impact of the recent unprecedented Israeli strikes and suspected Israeli attacks on the group’s communications devices, commanders and rocket stockpiles.
“Israel has prepared the battlefield with a series of stunning tactical masterstrokes that have diminished Hezbollah’s capacity to fight a prolonged, coordinated, full-fledged war,” Levitt said.
Brian Carter, Middle East portfolio manager at the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, told VOA that Hezbollah has had to spontaneously reshuffle its command structures.
“There has been significant disruption to those command systems, but the disruptions are temporary, and Hezbollah will try to fix them speedily with a potential Israeli ground offensive looming,” Carter said.
In a video posted online by the Israeli military, chief of staff Herzi Halevi told a group of soldiers on Wednesday near the border with Lebanon to prepare to enter enemy territory to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure. It was not clear when such a ground offensive may begin.
Speaking to VOA, Middle East Forum Research Director Jonathan Spyer said Israel has largely deterred Hezbollah from using precision weapons against central Israel.
“Israel has contained Hezbollah within a certain level of behavior. If Hezbollah goes beyond that, they know they will get the all-out war with Israel that they don’t want,” Spyer said.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly has said he would stop his 11 months of near-daily strikes on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas if Israel accepts the Palestinian terror group’s terms for a cease-fire in Gaza. Iran-backed Hamas started a war with Israel by invading from Gaza last October.
Levitt said Hezbollah does not want an all-out war with Israel because Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is the dominant political and military force, is in a dire economic situation.
“The Lebanese people are going to be very angry at Hezbollah for dragging the country into a war when that is not what they want or need right now,” Levitt said.
Hezbollah’s patron Iran also does not want it to fight an all-out war with Israel now, Levitt said, as that would involve expending a significant number of rockets.
“Iran wants Hezbollah to keep the powder dry on its precision-guided and long-range missiles, which Tehran sees as the best deterrent against Israel or anyone else attacking the Iranian nuclear program that has ratcheted up for the past year,” he added.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, said Israel’s “massive aggression” in Lebanon “cannot go unanswered,” but he did not elaborate on how Tehran will respond. “The responsibility for all consequences will be borne by those who have thwarted all global efforts to end this horrific catastrophe,” Pezeshkian said.
Hezbollah and Iran also want to preserve the group’s rocket arsenal because they see the conflict as a war of attrition that they want to last a long time, according to retired Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Sarit Zehavi, president of Alma Research and Education Center, which specializes in security challenges on Israel’s northern border.
“They don’t want to use up all of Hezbollah’s cards early in this conflict,” Zehavi told VOA. “They want Israel to get drawn into the Lebanese mud.”
Spyer said Hezbollah also wants to maintain a low-level conflict with Israel because the alternative, besides all-out war, would be a cease-fire that enables Israel to keep fighting Hamas in Gaza while returning Israelis to northern communities that they fled last year due to Hezbollah’s attacks.
“If Iran and Hezbollah concede to such a cease-fire, it would be a strategic setback, because it would undermine the credibility of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance,'” Spyer said. “Israel would demonstrate that this axis is a bunch of components that try to work together until sufficient pressure is applied, and then they stop working together, so there would be no more axis.”
Besides Hezbollah, other Iranian proxies also have attacked Israel in support of Hamas since last year. Yemen’s Houthis and militias based in Iraq and Syria have sporadically fired missiles, rockets and drones at the Jewish state.
