The Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire is a respite, not a wider solution

Just like Hezbollah’s surviving leaders, their patrons in Iran also wanted a ceasefire. Hezbollah needs a pause to lick its wounds. Iran needs to stop the geostrategic bleeding. Its axis of resistance is no longer a deterrent. Iran’s missile attack on Israel after Nasrallah’s assassination did not repair the damage.

Two men, both now assassinated, designed Hezbollah to deter Israel not just from attacking Lebanon – but also from attacking Iran. They were Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who was killed by an American drone strike at Baghdad airport in January 2020. The order was issued by Donald Trump in his last few weeks in the White House at the end of his first term. The other was Hassan Nasrallah, killed by a huge Israeli air strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah and Iran’s deterrence strategy matched Israel’s own deterrence for almost 20 years after the end of the 2006 war. But among the profound changes caused by the 7th October attacks was Israel’s determination not to accept restrictions on the wars it would wage in response. America, its most important ally, also put almost no restrictions on the supply or use of the weapons it kept on providing.

Nasrallah and Iran failed to see what had happened. They did not understand how Israel had changed. They sought to impose a war of attrition on Israel, and succeeded for almost a year. Then on 17th September Israel broke out of it by triggering the miniature bombs built into the network of booby-trapped pagers its intelligence services had duped Hezbollah into buying.

Hezbollah was thrown off balance. Before it could react with the most powerful weapons Iran had provided, Israel killed Nasrallah and most of his key lieutenants, accompanied by massive strikes that destroyed arms dumps. That was followed by an invasion of South Lebanon and the wholesale destruction of Lebanese border villages as well as Hezbollah’s tunnel network.