Israeli attacks in Lebanon mark a sharp strategic shift

The death toll from a devastating Israeli airstrike on central Beirut rose to at least 37 Saturday, with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah confirming that two of its senior commanders were among those killed. Dozens more were wounded in the strikes, which leveled two apartment buildings and plunged Lebanon into further chaos days after pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded en masse.

The attacks have left Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most sophisticated political and military force, in deep disarray and appeared to hail a stark shift in the calculations that had long governed the decades-old conflict between Israel and the militant group.

After a hugely destructive war in 2006, Hezbollah’s leaders spent years building military capacity they thought could counter and perhaps deter Israeli attacks. And until last week, Israel had refrained from launching the kind of attacks that its leaders had previously feared could provoke retaliatory strikes on critical infrastructure or incursions by Hezbollah commandos. However, events of the past few days have suggested that Hezbollah grossly underestimated its adversary, as Israel dashed across what had been unofficially considered red lines.

The region was on edge Saturday in anticipation of a Hezbollah counterattack, with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, telling reporters that the fighting posed an “acute” risk of escalation. Hezbollah issued calls for vengeance Saturday and fired rocket salvos into northern Israel, but those reactions are routine. Meanwhile, Israeli fighter jets continued to pummel Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including, its military said, hundreds of Hezbollah rocket launchers.

“Eighteen years of mutual deterrence has now given way to a new phase of one-sided superiority on the part of Israel,” said Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based research organization. “The facade that Hezbollah had been presenting to the world of it being an impenetrable organization is shattered, and Israel has displayed with flair how much of an upper hand it has in this equation vis-à-vis Hezbollah.”

On Saturday, Hezbollah released a list of names of members killed in Friday’s strike, including the leader of its elite Radwan force, Ahmed Wahbi. A day earlier, Hezbollah confirmed the death of the founder of the force, Ibrahim Akil, who had been overseeing its operations against Israel. He was long wanted by the United States for his role in two bombing attacks in 1983 that killed more than 350 people at the US Embassy in Beirut and the US Marine Corps barracks.

The leaders were among at least 16 Hezbollah fighters killed in the strike, according to Nadav Shoshani, a spokesperson for the Israeli military.

But the blasts Friday were not only a painful military blow to Hezbollah. The attack was devastating to the largely Shiite Muslim community in the densely populated area south of Beirut known as the Dahiya, where Hezbollah has long held sway.

A day after the airstrike, the relatives of those who lived in the two eight-story apartment buildings that were destroyed kept vigil, waiting to learn the fates of dozens of loved ones.

The buildings had been reduced to little more than concrete skeletons, and desperate, dazed-looking family members huddled in crowds just beyond the remains of sidewalks that had been ripped away and torn apart by the force of the blast. The occasional screeches of ambulance sirens were audible as rescuers brought in heavy equipment to remove tons of concrete in search of the missing.

Sorrow and rage emanated from those still awaiting news. Others whispered quietly among themselves, wondering just how a group seen as Israel’s most formidable regional foe had seen its operations so deeply penetrated.

After spending the night at the blast site, with an untold number of hours of waiting still ahead, Najwa Qubaisi pushed away every relative who tried to coax her from the building that had been home to her grandson and his family.

“How can I leave? I can’t,” she said, her eyes puffy from hours of crying. “I want to stay until I get some kind of news.”

Qubaisi said that her son, who had been outside the building when the Israeli attack hit, was alive. But she still had no news of her daughter-in-law and grandson, who had been at home.

Qubaisi declined to demand that Hezbollah take revenge, but she called for other Arab countries to act to stop Israel’s escalating attacks. “We want Arab countries to break their silence,” she said, “to do something against these crimes.”

The attacks in the past week appear to have constricted Hezbollah’s ability to respond. The simultaneous detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies incapacitated hundreds, if not thousands, of the group’s rank-and-file members but also severely disrupted its communications. Those detonations, which were widely attributed to Israel, transformed ordinary objects into weapons and have drawn widespread condemnation, including from members of the United Nations Security Council.

“These attacks represent a new development in warfare, where communication tools become weapons, simultaneously exploding across marketplaces, on street corners and in homes as daily life unfolds,” Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, told Council members Friday. He added that the operations had unleashed “widespread fear, panic and horror” among people in Lebanon, who now fear that any device may be vulnerable.

But as with Israel’s punishing response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, which has also drawn condemnation for a huge number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders have shown no sign of being deterred from future action.

On Friday, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said Israel would continue its “series of actions in the new stage” of its conflict with Hezbollah until tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the border area can return home. Some experts view that language as suggesting that Israel’s plans could include a ground invasion.

The buildings struck Friday in Beirut’s southern suburbs were among more than 100 sites, mostly in southern Lebanon, that Israel has targeted since Thursday evening. Lebanese officials said the strikes were some of the heaviest bombardment there in months of back-and-forth attacks. Earlier Friday, Israel said Hezbollah fired at least 140 rockets into northern Israel. Israel said that its air defenses had intercepted some of the rockets and that others had fallen in unpopulated areas.

The Israeli military said Saturday that its airstrikes had targeted hundreds of Hezbollah rocket launchers and that it had detected signs that Hezbollah was trying to fire more rockets and drones across Lebanon’s southern border. Earlier Saturday, Hezbollah launched a volley of 90 rockets, it said, that sparked brush fires near the city of Safed and in the country’s far north, where most residents had evacuated over the last year.

Friday’s attack followed 11 months of strikes between Hezbollah and Israel across the Lebanon-Israel border that killed people on both sides and forced about 150,000 residents in both countries to flee their homes. Hezbollah began striking northern Israel after the start of the war in Gaza last October, saying it was seeking to bog down Israeli forces in support of Hamas, its ally in Gaza.

The Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that started the war killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 dragged back to Gaza, damaging Israel’s sense of security and changing how its leaders thought about the threats on their borders.

Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza that aimed to destroy the group. Months of cease-fire negotiations have failed to stop the violence, and Gaza health authorities say that more than 41,000 people have been killed.

Israel’s tolerance for Hezbollah’s military presence on its northern border has also declined, and even before this past week, Israeli officials regularly called for stepped-up attacks on the group.

“It has been very clear since the first months of the war that Israel is saying, ‘This threat that we lived with for 18 years, we are not able to live with it anymore,’” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “‘We can’t have this massive force on our northern border.’”