Dancing on the Precipice

A month and a half ago, I published a piece in the aftermath of two assassinations in the Middle East where I asked if we were standing at the edge of disaster. After all, it was hard to imagine how Israel could directly provoke two of its most dangerous adversaries more. Fuad Shukr, one of the most senior commanders within Lebanon’s Hezbollah, was killed in Beiruit in response to a Hezbollah attack the previous weekend which had killed twelve children in the Golan Heights. Then Ismail Hanieyh, the leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran itself in a move that humiliated the powerful Revolutionary Guards who had proven unable to protect him.

We did indeed hold our breaths, but we did not go over the edge.

Hezbollah’s response was intended to be a massive barrage of missiles into Israel with the intent of overwhelming the Iron Dome air defense system (whose achilles heel is that it can only take out as many projectiles as it has the capacity to deal with). However these missiles require preparations in order to be fired, particularly if the intent is to do so en masse. Israel noted the preparations and, rather than absorb the Hezbollah response, launched pre-emptive strikes to eliminate as many of these weapons as they could before they were fired. Many of those that were fired were intercepted by the Iron Dome, and ultimately the damage to Israel infrastructure was minor. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was reduced to publicly lying to his supporters, claiming that the attack had been a massive success when in fact it had been comprehensively thwarted.

And at the time of writing, Iran has still not responded to Haniyeh’s assassination on their soil which has been surprising in and of itself. After all, if anything was going to push the Iranian leadership to make a response, surely it was Haniyeh’s death while he was a guest in their country.

Resul Serdar Atas, writing in a recent article for Al Jazeera on why they haven’t responded, believes that Iran simply doesn’t want a regional war it cannot afford.

“Tehran faces a stark choice: It needs to restore deterrence while avoiding regional war…

Iran’s “strategic patience” is directly linked to its capacity-building work – nuclear, military, intelligence, economic and technological – which it has maintained without any major interruptions.

In response to each wave of sanctions since the early 1990s and attacks on its assets or key figures, Iran has stepped up its capacity, particularly in nuclear activities and missile programmes.

Iran’s reaction to Haniyeh’s assassination could well be a similar acceleration of capacity-building, using its proxies as temporary tactical deterrents while focusing on its nuclear programme – the ultimate deterrent.

An all-out war would increase the risk to these temporary deterrents and to its ultimate – and nuclear – deterrent at home.

However, Israel, not Iran, will influence how the story unfolds.

Tel Aviv, not Tehran, will decide whether Iran’s response is “appropriate”, with the assurance of “ironclad” US backing. This ambiguity is what causes Iran to think twice before acting.”

With Hezbollah’s response blunted, and Tehran hesitating, we seemed to be pulling back from the brink, and I use ‘we’ as none of us will be spared the consequences of all out war in the Middle East.

At least, we seemed to be pulling back until 15:30 P.M local time in Beirut last Tuesday, when thousands of Hezbollah members across Lebanon heard a beeping sound indicating they had received a message on their pagers. Aware of the sophisticated intelligence capabilities of Israel, Hezbollah has ordered its members to use old style pagers for communication purposes. The idea seems to have been that the less sophisticated technology would be far more secure and safer than mobile phones Israel could track.

That was not the case to put it mildly.

After the beep there seems to have been a short delay, just enough time for someone to fish the pager out of a pocket and raise it to their face to look at the message, before the devices detonated. An article on Press TV details the aftermath (Note: Press TV is an international media organisation that is owned by the Iranian State and anyone viewing their content or reading articles on the website must bear in mind that Press TV is NOT an impartial news organisation and can be fairly characterised as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic of Iran. I am citing the passage below to detail the consequences of what has happened).

“Dr. Bassam Mortada, a specialist in anesthesiology and reanimation, who performed a series of surgeries at the Chtoura Hospital after the incident on Tuesday, spoke to the Press TV website and said what he saw and confronted were gory scenes resulting from the pager detonations.

“The cases that required urgent operations had amputated fingers or hands, with severe facial injuries, especially to the eyes,” he explained.

“The majority of injuries are to the hands, eyes, face, neck, and chest. Some injuries also affect the waist and legs. It is likely that explosive materials were placed in the pagers, and I don’t believe this was a cyber attack.”

Dr. Mortada, who attended to hundreds of patients until late on Tuesday, said facial injuries from explosions pose significant challenges to doctors in restoring proper ocular, oral, and facial functions, including the eyes, nose, and ears

He added that many of the injured were young Lebanese men with distorted facial features, some of whom required intensive care following surgical procedures”

The following day, whilst reeling from the chaos, walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah also exploded, leading to more dead and wounded. Thirty two people, including several children, have been killed in the attacks. Thousands have been injured, and many of those will suffer life changing injuries given that these miniature bombs were almost certainly being held in hands and in proximity to the face when they went off. Lebanese hospitals have been overwhelmed, and while neighbouring countries are sending support, the nature of the injuries means that the specialist and time sensitive treatments required to mitigate much of the damage (particularly to those suffering damage to their eyes) is not available. There simply isn’t the capacity. Needless to say, some are saying the use of these devices as indiscriminate weapons constitutes a war-crime.

Whilst the specifics may take years to come out, there seems to be little doubt as to the who, how and why behind the attack.

It is believed that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, managed to access the supply chain Hezbollah was using to procure pagers and walkie-talkies and managed to sabotage thousands of the devices, turning them into weapons.

In many ways, this leads back to the Iranian strategy regarding Israel. Across many years, Iran has built its ‘axis of resistance’, an alliance of states and non-state actors opposed to the presence of the United States and Israel in the Middle East. Unable and unwilling (if it can help it) to engage Israel directly, Iran’s proxies are instead attempting to encircle Israel. Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon to Israel’s north, Syria sharing a border with Israel, Iran’s allies in Iraq, the Houthis in Lebanon and of course Iran itself are all placed to threaten Israel and thus afford Iran leverage against the Jewish state.

The October 7th assault seems to have profoundly altered Israel’s calculations regarding this encirclement in that it seems to have decided it can no longer be tolerated. The booby trapped devices are therefore a part of Israel’s attempts to degrade the capabilities of Iran’s proxies, a smaller part of the same strategy being employed against the Houthis (whose critical port of Hodeidah was recently devastated in an Israeli retaliation) and which seems to be the underlying reasoning behind the razing of Gaza and the deaths of at least 40,000 Palestinians in an attempt to dismantle Hamas.

But Jeremy Bowen writes the following in an article for the BBC

“Attacking Hezbollah’s communications network has delivered a tactical victory to Israel – the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller.

However there is a potentially serious strategic downside for Israel, because while this humiliates the powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, it doesn’t deter them.

And it doesn’t get closer to Israel’s strategic aim of stopping Hezbollah’s attacks and allowing the more than 60,000 Israelis on the northern border who haven’t been in their houses for nearly a year to return home.”

Bowen also answers the question as what the point of the attack was, given in isolation it seems to have done nothing but humiliate Hezbollah and devastate its morale, which would normally be something employed in the prelude to a mass assault from Israel into Lebanon.

“The Israelis have used important, audacious weapons, which are clearly very effective in their terms.

But reports in Al Monitor, a respected Middle East newsletter, say that they were not able to use them in the way they hoped.

The original plan, it says, was for Israel to follow up with devastating attacks while Hezbollah was still reeling. The pager attack, the reports say, was to be the opening salvo in a big escalation – as part of an offensive or perhaps an invasion of southern Lebanon.

But these same reports say that Hezbollah was getting suspicious – forcing Israel to trigger these attacks early. So the Israelis have shown they can get into Hezbollah’s communications and shown they can humiliate them, but these attacks do not take the region one inch further back from all out war. Instead they push it closer.”

Israel in other words was faced with a ‘use it or lose it’ moment, and decided to do what damage it could while it had the option.

So, just as we were a month and a half ago, we are once again on the edge. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was injured in the attacks, meaning Iran has an excuse to retaliate against Israel (not to mention that from the Iranian perspective, the account for Haniyeh’s assassination is still unsettled). Hezbollah has been utterly humiliated, their vaunted security shown to be nothing of the sort for the whole world to see, and there will be substantial pressure on them to do something to reassert themselves as a credible threat.

On the face of it, it seems that Israel seems to be doing everything within its power to provoke a wider conflict, safe in the knowledge that no matter who is in the White House, a regional war will inevitably draw in the United States. They dance on the edge of disaster, daring to see how far they can push things without falling in. But if you keep doing that, eventually you will push things too far.

Right now we don’t know if this is that moment. Has Israel pushed things too far, to the point where the Hezbollah or Iranian retaliation will be of a level that leads to war? Or will they once again pull back? Once again, we wait to see.

I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.