Rumble of warfare is already echoing along Lebanon’s border with Israel, which on Sunday dispatched helicopters to attack what it called military targets in Lebanon
On a hilltop overlooking the ancient city of Baalbek, where the Romans built one of the largest temples in their empire, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militant group, has transformed an anti-aircraft defence site into an open-air jihad tourist museum.
“Everyone is looking at Hezbollah and wondering what they’re going to do,” said Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program. Israeli military planners call Hezbollah their country’s gravest threat. Hezbollah’s fighting ranks have swelled to more than 60,000, at least 12 times its size in 2006, observers say. Its sub-ballistic missiles can deliver 500-kilogram warheads to targets 300 kilometres away, with 10- to 20-metre precision. It possesses anti-ship missiles and an estimated 130,000 rockets, enough to challenge Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome air defence system.
Old assumptions may no longer apply, including the belief that Iran would only mobilize Hezbollah if Iranian territory were to come under attack. Instead, Tehran’s desire to preserve its “axis of resistance” may press it to act if one part of that axis faces an existential threat – such as Israel’s bid to destroy Hamas, or at the least eliminate its leadership.
For Hezbollah to go to war with Israel would mark a break from a bloody truce the two sides have observed since 2006, during which they have shelled each other, but within bounds calculated to avoid escalation to war. Even the intensification in recent days appears to be Hezbollah “purposefully messaging,” said Tobias Borck, a specialist in Middle East security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.That message, he said, is: “‘Hamas, we’re with you, solidarity and all that.
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