Israel und Hisbollah steuern auf eine Katastrophe zu: Wie lässt sich ein größerer Krieg verhindern, den keine der beiden Seiten will?

[SS from essay by Dana Stroul, Director of Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East from February 2021 to February 2024.]

Within 24 hours of Hamas’s October 7 terror attack, Hezbollah followed with an attack of its own, launching projectiles from Lebanon into northern Israel. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, explained that the campaign was intended to strain Israel’s resources and force the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), then preparing its response to Hamas in Gaza, to fight on two fronts. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar hoped that Hezbollah, along with other Iranian-backed groups across the Middle East, would encircle Israel in a “ring of fire,” overwhelm its defenses, and threaten its existence.

Yet Nasrallah instead chose a middle-ground approach of incremental escalation—a pragmatic effort to signal solidarity with Hamas without risking Hezbollah’s survival as the most sophisticated and lethal arm of Iran’s proxy network. Since then, Hezbollah has continued to design its attacks to stay below the threshold of a full-scale conflagration. The group has continuously pressured northern Israel, forcing an estimated 80,000 civilians to evacuate their homes (creating a political challenge for the Israeli governing coalition) and forcing the IDF to allocate limited air defense, air power, and personnel to the north. But the confined geographic scope of the attacks; their target selection of military sites rather than civilian areas; and the choice of weapons used, refraining from drawing on an arsenal of precision-guided missiles, are telling.