Israel’s pinpoint strike on a southern Beirut suburb killing the Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in his underground command post to end his 32-year reign as secretary-general of the terrorist organisation with political wings has sparked fears of a far wider escalation of the Middle East war.
The killing of the top leadership that shaped Hezbollah into rebuilding its military machine since wars in the early parts of the millennium against Israel to become the world’s most heavily armed terror group may seem a huge setback now.
The strike that followed months of intelligence may not, however, have knocked out the group’s ability to keep firing missiles on Israel, which it has been doing with scores of projectiles per day since the barbaric October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.
A tectonic shift may not come about in Iran’s influence on its proxies in the region because of this strategically precise operation with powerful bunker buster bombs to hit a major figure like Nasrallah. What Iran does now in the face of this pointed attack on Hezbollah and one of its own revolutionary force commanders is what will define events in the war.
Having taken direct action against its sworn enemy, Israel, only in the softest possible way even after the extreme provocation of having a diplomatic compound in Syria bombed, Iran may continue to act only through proxies, sending even more powerful weapons into Lebanon.
An indication of an immediate reaction out of Iran is that the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei had said that Hezbollah would continue to be at the helm of the resistance forces and that its military capabilities had not been destroyed.
It is debatable whether Israel, with its claim of an existential threat hanging historically over it since its formation, has the moral right to escalate its action against Hezbollah in this manner. But then, ranged against such a line of argument would be the militant organisation’s history of terror acts against Israelis and citizens of many other nationalities, including the United States and France.
Since Hezbollah had not stopped its military action in launching myriad missiles from October 8, the day after Hamas crossed the border into Israel to attack and take hostages, Israel has been on the offensive, mostly in reducing Gaza to rubble before opening this second front recently against Hezbollah with heavy bombing runs over Lebanon.
A feared ground invasion that may have stretched Israel’s capabilities did not come about and the tactic of taking aim at the Hezbollah leader has worked well with regard to strategy, but Israelis are living in fear of counter-strikes from Hezbollah with most settlers in northern Israel having moved out of range of the Lebanon border.
The dynamics of the conflict have altered now with the elimination of Nasrallah, likely making way for his cousin Hashem Safieddine, another persona designated as a global terrorist by the United States, who will be hoping to regroup his army of fighters who are far better equipped and trained than the Hamas of the Gaza Strip.
The world is aghast at the cost of war but the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political stake in continuing to keep his country on the offensive is heavy, illustrated his defiance with a speech at the United Nations even as his bombers were taking off to strike Beirut. Where this will end and whether any major powers will be sucked into this Middle Eastern cauldron is open to question.
