The targeted killing of three Lebanese Hezbollah members by Israel this week constitutes a significant escalation in the limited war now underway between Israel and the Lebanese Shi’ite Islamist movement.
Lebanese Hezbollah regional unit commander Hassan Hussein Salami was killed while driving in the village of Majadel in southern Lebanon. Elsewhere, Israeli jets struck targets in the Hezbollah heartland area of Baalbek. Two other Hezbollah members – Hassan Ali Younes, and Ahmed Mohammed Sindiyan – were killed in this second strike, near the town of Aadous, according to an announcement by the organization.
The area targeted is 18 km. from the city of Baalbek. It is located east of the Litani and about 75 km. from the border with Israel. Hezbollah also announced the death of a fourth fighter, Mohammed Ali Musulmani.
These killings came in response to Hezbollah’s downing of an Israel Hermes 450 drone, using a surface-to-air missile. The organization responded, in turn, by launching a barrage of rockets at the Golan Heights and the western Galilee, causing no casualties.
While Salami was the highest ranking of the targeted Hezbollah men, the decision to extend the range of Israeli attacks to Baalbek, and thus the killings of Younes and Sindiyan, appear to be the more significant details of these latest attacks.
Salami was a notable commander, but he is not the first such figure to be targeted by Israel in Lebanon’s south since October 7. Wissam Tawil, a senior figure in the movement’s armed wing, was killed by a roadside bomb on January 8, for example. But regarding Baalbek, Israel’s targeting had previously extended farthest from the border to the western Lebanese town of Sidon, about 50 km. from the border.
The strike on Baalbek demonstrates the extent to which Israel has discarded previous tacit “rules of engagement” between it and Hezbollah. It shows that as of now, Jerusalem appears to have the tactical advantage over its Iran-linked foes.
Hezbollah seems to have been caught off guard by Israel’s willingness to operate beyond previous boundaries. The movement has paid a considerable price for its decision on October 8 to enter the fight against Israel, albeit in a limited way. To date, 237 fighters have been killed, along with 44 Lebanese civilians, according to AFP figures. By comparison, 10 IDF soldiers and six Israeli civilians have died.
Hezbollah’s actions suggest a reluctance to escalate in kind. Rather, it is continuing its daily attacks on static Israeli posts along the border, utilizing a variety of the weapons systems available to it. Amid the political and economic crisis in Lebanon, it is currently hardly able to contemplate more ambitious moves.
Israel’s increased boldness in Lebanon is, in turn, a detail in a broader pattern visible also in Syria, in which Jerusalem is broadening the scope and depth of its activities beyond anything seen before October 7. This includes the targeting and killing of officials of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) on Syrian soil.
Around six operatives of the movement have been killed in strikes on Syria since October 7. (Unlike the latest strike on Baalbek, Israel has not taken responsibility for these killings. The list of possible other candidates for ownership of these operations, however, is essentially blank.)
What is behind the escalation?
WHAT IS behind this escalation? Firstly, it is worth noting that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant initiated an uptick in the intensity of Israeli operations into Syria even before the outbreak of the current Gaza war. Gallant, who also wanted to launch a strike on Hezbollah following October 8, appears to have little faith in the chances of success of Western diplomatic efforts to regulate the Israel-Lebanon border.
Rather, his actions (and previous statements) indicate that he grasps the gravity of the strategic situation that Israel has allowed to emerge on its northern border and wants to initiate decisive action not merely to hurt the enemy but to alter this situation substantially.
In this regard, it is important to be aware that while Israel’s armed forces and intelligence services have performed well so far in the tactical engagement with Hezbollah, the strategic situation supplies fewer causes for satisfaction.
Hussein Salama, a notable pro-Hezbollah commentator in Lebanon, writing in the Al-Akhbar newspaper on February 27, made the simple and accurate point that “the Gaza war is being fought against the Mahwar al-Muqawama (Resistance Axis),” the term by which the Iran-led regional alliance prefers to be known.
Reflecting this alliance’s view of itself and of regional dynamics, Salama went on to list various achievements and ambitions of this axis, including the supposedly upcoming “second liberation of Iraq from the American forces currently expanding into Syria.”
Once the picture is broadened and deepened to include this perspective, according to which Israel in its southern and northern campaigns is fighting against members of a single state-led alliance, Jerusalem’s tactical achievements in the North assume a more modest perspective. Israel is demonstrating its prowess in air warfare, intelligence gathering, and tactical defense, catching Hezbollah off guard at a difficult time for the movement.
But it is Iran that has successfully seeded semi-regular insurgent armies on Israel’s borders. And since October 7, Iran has utilized those armies to slaughter over 1,000 Israeli civilians, upturn the global diplomatic agenda, divert attention from its nuclear efforts and internal instability (and from its Russian ally’s attempt to destroy a neighboring European state), place on hold any chances for further Israeli gains in regional diplomacy and, not incidentally, force 86,000 Israelis from their homes along Israel’s northern border.
As Brig.-Gen. Eran Ortal, former commander of the IDF’s Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, put it in a recent interview with Israeli journalist Amir Oren: “Israel does not have ‘military weight’ far from here, but the Iranians have dramatic military weight here next to us. This is a basic and fundamental asymmetry, and we have not yet adapted to it.
“I hear senior officers talking about us as a regional power, and that’s dangerous because thinking you’re a power persuades you that you can forever carry out attrition operations, but in reality the Iranians are achieving attrition against us, and not us against them.”
This statement recalls the Persian expression, told to me once by an Iranian acquaintance in northern Iraq, that “Other nations will kill you with iron; Iranians will kill you with cotton.”
The expression suggests patience and the slow, gradual assembling of the instruments of murder. Iran has been pursuing a strategy of this kind across the region and on Israel’s borders for some decades. Before October 7, Israeli strategists thought that building adequate fences along the border would permit Israel to ignore or deter this project. No one believes that anymore.
The current dimensions and direction of Israeli military actions to the north since October 7 suggest a straining to get beyond this previous paradigm and to turn the current war into an effort to strike real, even fatal, blows at the Iran-supported Islamist armies that have built themselves on the borders over the last 30 years.
It remains to be seen if such an effort will be attempted in the period ahead or if diplomatic and political pressures will continue to prevent it.