Michael Safi
The Guardian / July 24, 2024
Michael Safi reported in Lebanon for three years, and all his life has been visiting family who live there. He recently returned to cover the impact of the Hezbollah-Israel conflict.
While it gets less coverage than it might if Israel’s assault on Gaza were not happening at the same time, “it’s the most sustained conflict between the two sides since 2006”, he said. At the same time, “like always in Lebanon, you live in many worlds at once. You go to the border and see destroyed villages, and 45 minutes away is a beach where people are getting a tan. That tension is palpable.”
What are the origins of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel ?
Since Hezbollah’s foundation in 1982 – the same year Israel invaded Lebanon in response to attacks carried out by Palestinian militants from its territory – it has been devoted to the expulsion of western powers from the Middle East, and rejects Israel’s right to exist. The militant Islamist organization controls many Shia-majority areas of Lebanon, particularly in the south near the Israeli border.
Analysts say that its major strategic decisions are taken in consultation with Iran, which trains, funds and supplies its forces. Even against the backdrop of Hamas’s 7 October attack, it is still perceived as the greatest long-term threat to Israeli security.
The two sides have fought repeatedly over the last 40 years, and Hezbollah succeeded in forcing Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Since then, an ongoing border dispute over Israeli-held territory that Hezbollah claims is part of Lebanon has been the source of continuing low-level conflict that last flared into all-out war in 2006.
On 6 October, “tensions were really high anyway”, Michael said. “The two sides are constantly testing each other’s resolve. Hezbollah is constantly trying to push the rules of engagement – in April last year they fired the biggest salvo of rockets since 2006. So things were tense, but there has been this feeling that neither side wants to go back to a full-scale war.”
What’s happened since 7 October ?
Initially, about 80,000 Israelis were evacuated from communities within 10km of the border in case of a Hezbollah incursion. While that did not materialize, there was an immediate increase in rocket attacks, prompting Israeli reprisals.
Both sides have broadly stuck to the undeclared rules of engagement. But Israel has killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters including senior commanders, and Hezbollah’s attacks in response have reached deeper into Israel. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said last week that it was ready to broaden its range of targets. “Hezbollah won’t say this, but seeing the vulnerability of very senior people has to be eye-opening,” Michael said. “And it is broadly true that while they initially intensified their attacks, they did not intend to still be exchanging fire nine months later.”
At the same time, he added, “they’ve been pretty skilled at keeping up. They launched a drone that managed to take very close-up footage of strategic points in the city of Haifa, and that was a real shock – that they were able to intrude on Israeli airspace with impunity”. This Foreign Policy piece explains some of Hezbollah’s other successes in challenging Israel’s formidable Iron Dome defence system, including the novel use of antitank missiles to target civilian and military sites along the border.
Despite the deaths of at least 100 Lebanese and 13 Israeli civilians, there is still a sense that the dynamic is “a conversation – a violent and dangerous conversation, but still a conversation”, Michael said. “One group does something, and the other responds in a calibrated way. We haven’t yet reached the point where it spirals out of control.”
How have the frontlines of the conflict been affected ?
Odaisseh and Kfar Kila are now all but deserted, with more UN peacekeepers on patrol than residents. In his reporting, Michael said, “one of the main things I came away feeling was that the scale of the destruction was oddly familiar. I couldn’t figure out why. It was only later that I realized it reminded me of footage from Gaza – destroyed buildings everywhere you look, whole neighbourhoods razed to the ground.”
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The other vivid detail: just how close Israeli settlements on the other side of the border are. “People living in these villages could look over to the Israeli side of the valley and watch people going about their day. These are intimate neighbours. So that explains the suggestion that Israel is trying to turn these places into no man’s land. It literally gives you a buffer zone – so that if Hezbollah was to try to launch a 7 October-style attack, they would have to cover more ground.”
But if Israel does persist with that plan, Hezbollah can make the return of residents to Israeli villages on the other side impossible, too. Jason Burke reported from the kibbutz of Rosh HaNikra last week, where all but half a dozen of 1,000 residents have been scattered across northern Israel. One of the few to return, 73-year-old Janet Tass, told him: “Most people from the kibbutz, even those without children, say they just don’t feel secure enough to come back.”
Where does this leave the Lebanese public ?
“It’s hard to get reliable estimates of Lebanese opinion,” Michael said. “If you drive around Beirut, there are billboards that say the Lebanese people do not want war, and calling for Hezbollah to back down. There are people who think that Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into a war it literally cannot afford because it’s bankrupt. But Hezbollah are the most powerful force in the country. Nobody can stop them.”
There are also those who support Hezbollah even outside their traditional power base. “There is such outrage over Gaza, and I get a sense from a lot of young people that they see Hezbollah as standing up to Israel,” Michael said. “I met a woman on the beach in Tyre who gestured at the scene around her and said – Hezbollah don’t vibe with me, I don’t vibe with them, but I trust what they’re doing.”
What are the risks of escalation ?
Most experts think that they are considerable, and getting worse. The New York Times recently reported that the US is passing messages to Hezbollah warning that if Israel commits to an all-out war, Washington does not have the leverage to stop them. Meanwhile, as Michael writes:
Both sides would prefer to end the fighting so that civilians can return home, but are entangled in a cycle of mutual escalation. ‘What’s going on now is an attrition war,’ says Khalil Helou, a retired Lebanese general. ‘One that we are losing, as Lebanon. And Hezbollah is losing. And Israel is losing.’
“Hezbollah fighters and commanders are very disciplined,” Michael said. “But the missiles they’re launching are not perfectly targeted. All it would take is for one to land in the wrong place. A mass civilian casualty event on the Lebanese side of the border would have the same effect. The dynamic is just inherently dangerous.”
One source for relative optimism is the view among most western diplomats that Iran does not want a major conflict, even if it says publicly that it would respond to an Israeli offensive in Lebanon with an “obliterating war”. Meanwhile, Michael said, “talking to people in the Lebanese security establishment, their sense was that Israel is not about to launch a full-scale invasion like we’ve seen in the past”.
But neither side’s reluctance is a guarantee. The most likely path to de-escalation is a ceasefire, or something that can be presented as a ceasefire, in Gaza. But the longer the wait for that goes on, the more the ratchet turns. “The risk is always there,” Michael said. “The feeling in Lebanon is that another war may eventually be inevitable.”
Michael Safi is an international correspondent for The Guardian, based in the Middle East
