Hezbollah’s fatal miscalculations

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

TEL AVIV, Israel — “We are winning.”

That’s the unwavering refrain from senior Israeli officials when asked about where all the warfare roiling the Levant will end.

Astonishingly scything through arch-foe Hezbollah’s upper echelons, remorselessly picking off leaders and military commanders one after another, Israel’s becoming increasingly bullish, convinced the disaster of Oct. 7 is being paid back.

Israel is being made safer, victory snatched from the jaws of defeat — or so its leaders argue. And soon, they believe, it will achieve the unbelievable — vanquishing both of Iran’s key allies in the region: Hamas and Hezbollah — the redrawing of the Middle East’s geopolitical map within its grasp.

Of course, how Israel’s military campaign actually fares — whether Iran and Hezbollah find a convenient hook to disengage, are thoroughly defeated on the battlefield or, as some fear, Israel is beckoned by a quagmire in the stony, ravine-filled terrain of southern Lebanon — only time will tell. But whatever happens, the cost in human misery and lives will be high. And as Israelis continue to mourn those murdered in Hamas’ slaughter of innocents, many are in no mood to think much about the human toll in Lebanon or Gaza.

But while it’s premature for Israel to celebrate its extraordinary military achievements, there can be no doubt that Iran and Hezbollah are on the back foot. And that is thanks to the miscalculations made by both Hezbollah’s now-dead leader of three decades, Hassan Nasrallah, and the mullahs in Tehran.

In Nasrallah’s case, the missteps cost him his life — as did his decision to remain in Lebanon, despite being urged to flee by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his friend and backer.

“Already, Hezbollah has been greatly diminished,” said Paul Salem, former president of the Middle East Institute. “Hezbollah’s charismatic leader is gone; most of the leadership is gone; their communications are hit. They’ve lost their deterrent power against Israel, and they have no defense against Israel’s aerial attacks. Hezbollah’s raison d’être — defending the villages of the south — has gone too. They’ve all been evacuated,” he told POLITICO.

In short, Hezbollah was meant to be Lebanon’s protector from Israel. Nasrallah was the protector-in-chief; under his leadership, Hezbollah became the key reason Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, worn down by the high casualties inflicted on the Israel Defense Forces. His popularity among Lebanon’s Shia stems from that withdrawal, which boosted Hezbollah’s standing and power in the country as a whole.

But far from deterring Israel, this time Nasrallah overreached. Hezbollah’s relentless cross-border rocket attacks compelled an Israeli response, and now, Iran’s weakness has also been exposed.

After two missile barrages — one in April and one last week — Iran’s been unable to penetrate Israel’s U.S.-supported air defenses to any great effect. The situation has left Iran’s 85-year-old Khamenei to fulminate and sound like a ranting King Lear, threatening to “do such things — what they are yet I know not — but they shall be the terrors of the earth.”

And maybe terrors are still to come. Hezbollah has a huge stockpile of long-range ballistic missiles it hasn’t used, and no one should discount the capability of Hezbollah fighters — battle-hardened from years of fighting in Syria — to sustain guerrilla warfare. Plus, while Iran’s medium-range missiles caused only minor damage to a handful of hardened military facilities last week, if these missiles were fired at power plants and other civilian infrastructure, the picture could be very different.

But so far, Hezbollah and Iran are reeling and flailing. How come?

A key miscalculation made by Nasrallah and Tehran’s mullahs was misunderstanding how the savage Oct. 7 attacks changed Israel. Shaken to their core, many Israelis feared the world’s only Jewish state was facing an existential crisis, and therefore, any risks — however perilous — had to be courted to ensure Israel’s survival. Hence the year-long war in Gaza, as well as the decision to take on Hezbollah — first with airstrikes and now on the ground — even if it risks rockets and missiles penetrating air defenses and causing mass casualties in Israel.

“Nasrallah misread Israel. That’s a repeat of the mistake he made in 2006,” said Michael Milshtein, the former head of the Department for Palestinians Affairs in the Israel Defense Intelligence Directorate.

The 2006 conflict was sparked by a Hezbollah ambush on Israeli territory, which left three soldiers dead and two abducted. After the 34-day war was concluded, Nasrallah publicly admitted he’d misread Israel, saying he wouldn’t have ordered the capture of the Israeli soldiers had he known it would trigger full-blown war. “If I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

He misunderstood Israel this time too, as the Hamas attacks made Israelis even less tolerant of the Hezbollah threat — their patience “dropped to nearly zero in the wake of the October 2023 attacks,” said Matthew Savill of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “The Israeli threshold for pain is higher” now than during the last clash, they’re willing to withstand more.

Another miscalculation Nasrallah and Iran made was underestimating Israel’s military superiority and intelligence capabilities. They failed to appreciate just how thoroughly Hezbollah’s ranks had been painstakingly infiltrated, allowing Israel to booby trap its communications systems, track top leaders and commanders — including finding Nasrallah’s whereabouts, which has been a closely guarded secret for years — and assassinate them.

Milshtein said Israeli intelligence had made a huge effort to map everything it could about Hezbollah and to scatter assets inside the organization — especially since 2016. So, while Hezbollah was building and refining its network of tunnels in southern Lebanon, Mossad was burrowing deeper inside the Shia movement. And in this regard, Hezbollah’s campaign in support of Syria’s President Bashar Assad proved highly useful — leaving its military structure, formations and command and control systems much more open to surveillance. According to Milshtein, it also offered more recruiting opportunities for Mossad.

“A lot of the actionable intelligence being used now is coming from human agents and not just technological means,” he added. “Hezbollah has been penetrated.”

Iran’s decision to launch direct attacks on Israel, crossing what for decades was an unthinkable red line, has only compounded the misstep of misreading Israel and underestimating its capabilities.

For Netanyahu, this has been a godsend. Long scoffed at for seeing the long hand of Iran’s mullahs behind almost every threat to Israel’s security and widely accused of exaggerating the risks of a direct attack by Tehran, Netanyahu was able to turn the strikes to his political advantage, claiming the mask had dropped, the real enemy was clear and all roads led to Tehran.

Since then, he’s had a somewhat easier time with the Americans as well — despite President Joe Biden administration’s frustrations with his brazen disregard of U.S. fears around a regional war and the resulting human toll — receiving a quiet nod of approval for Israel’s incursion across the border into southern Lebanon. 

Meanwhile, Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who ordered his country’s troops across the border in 2006, frets that once again Netanyahu is only talking in terms of winning, while neglecting to outline what comes after. “I don’t understand what’s precisely the strategy here,” he told POLITICO.

But come what may, Salem believes Hezbollah will endure. “They will survive, and they are surviving. They can still fight on the ground, and they have rockets they can launch at Israel and so on to some effect. But any real recovery will take many, many years,” he added.