Peter Beaumont
The Guardian / September 29, 2024
Targeting of group’s leaders has failed to win Israel significant strategic advantage in past, let alone deal fatal blow.
Jerusalem – In 1992, Israeli media celebrated an assassination. The man killed then was Abbas al-Musawi, the secretary general of Hezbollah, whose convoy was struck by Israeli helicopters.
Then, as now, Israeli analysts speculated that Musawi’s death might possibly portend the end of Hezbollah, which had been founded 10 years before after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
The opposite would turn out to be true. Musawi was succeeded by his 31-year-old protege, Hassan Nasrallah, who went on to lead and build Hezbollah for three decades, right until his own assassination by Israel on Friday.
Nasrallah’s killing, in a subterranean Hezbollah headquarters in a southern suburb of Beirut, has inevitably focused attention on two questions: whether Israel’s long-term policy of assassinations is effective, and what the killing of Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah commanders means for the group.
The issue of the efficacy of assassinations is a moot point, even within the Israeli security and political establishment which have long debated the issue, including some current ministers who reportedly opposed Nasrallah’s killing.
Israel has also killed senior members of Hamas in the past, including key founders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, both in 2004, neither of which delivered it any long-term strategic advantage when it came to Gaza.
The reality is that it may take months to see what, if any, significant impact the campaign of assassinations of Hezbollah leaders will have dealt the group, not least because of Nasrallah’s decades-long efforts to embed it in Lebanese-Shia society as a social provider as well as an armed force.
While experts consider Hezbollah to have been significantly harmed by recent events, many are uncertain whether it is a fatal blow or indeed whether the advantage to Israel may turn out to have been overstated, on the ground and in terms of diplomatic fallout.
Sanam Vakil, the head of the Chatham House thinktank’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, unpacked some of these contradictions.
“Hezbollah is militarily and operationally degraded,” Vakil wrote on X, “and knows that any escalation will lead to a conflict they cannot win. But should it not respond, its morale and legitimacy will be further weakened.
She added: “What should be heeded though is that both Hezbollah and Hamas while down, are certainly not out. The continuation of fighting will undoubtedly mobilize if not radicalize another generation of fighters.”
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the veteran journalist Jack Khoury questioned whether the latest assassinations would benefit Israel. “This is not the first targeted killing of a Hezbollah leader that Israel has carried out … it quickly turned out that their replacements didn’t display a more moderate or less militant attitude.”
In the immediate term, it is also clear that Nasrallah’s assassination and the heavy strikes of recent days have not stopped rocket fire towards Israel, even if for now it is somewhat diminished.
The reality is that Hezbollah’s impact on Israel, from the beginning of the war on 8 October – with tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the north – was largely achieved with a relatively small-scale intervention, not with the use of Hezbollah’s heavy rocket arsenal.
Indeed most of the initial displacement followed small, lighter sporadic attacks with anti-tank weapons across the border before the emerging use of more sophisticated weapons such as kamikaze drones, a pattern that Israel has struggled to counter.
And while an ageing generation of Hezbollah’s top leadership – many of them personally connected to Nasrallah – has been removed, it is unclear whether those who replace them will share the same approach in trying to manage the conflict beneath the threshold of all-out war.
While Nasrallah ultimately failed in this ambition, not least by fatally underestimating the calculus in Israel, it is not yet clear whether Israel’s decision to kill him, in the longer term, is necessarily more sound.
Already it is clear that one aspect of the Iranian response is to rapidly reify the idea of Nasrallah as an indispensable “martyr” and “master of resistance” who can remain as a figurehead for the movement.
Other experts see Hezbollah as more resilient than its recent losses might suggest.
“Hezbollah is a robust institution with a strong chain of command that should ensure continuity at the leadership level,” wrote Nicholas Blanford, a longtime observer of the group, in an opinion for the Atlantic Council thinktank.
“An unknown factor, however, is who within the upper echelons of Hezbollah died alongside Nasrallah. If other significant leaders were killed, it could complicate – and perhaps delay for a while – the process of re-establishing command and control over the entire organisation, potentially leaving the party vulnerable to Israel’s next moves.
“Another pressing question is whether the death of Nasrallah will force Iran and Hezbollah to begin employing more advanced precision-guided missile systems that could potentially inflict far greater damage and casualties in Israel compared to the older, unguided rockets the group has been using until now.
“Or will cold rational logic continue to prevail, with Tehran ensuring a vengeful and angry Hezbollah does not fall into the trap of a full-force response against Israel? A response of that kind could lead to a major war, one that could erode Hezbollah’s capabilities and therefore reduce its deterrence effect for Iran. The coming days will tell.”
Writing in the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Anthony Samrani also warned against underestimating the group.
“We know nothing about what is happening inside the party, nor anything about the intentions of the Iranians,” he wrote. “Israel carried out thousands of strikes in a week, which likely destroyed part of Hezbollah’s arsenal. But neither the 150,000 missiles and rockets it holds, nor the tens of thousands of armed men who form the militia, have disappeared in the snap of a finger.
“Even if it seems more complicated every day, we cannot exclude the fact that Hezbollah still has the means to respond to its adversary and wage a total and longer-lasting war. The party is in shock. Can it really?”
He added: “All scenarios are on the table. That of a total war, of a defeat that the [Shia] party will make Lebanon pay for, and of the most fragile opportunity, to finally learn the lessons of everything that led Lebanon, beyond Hezbollah, to find itself in this situation.”
Peter Beaumont is a senior international reporter
