Daniel Byman, Seth G. Jones and Alexander Palmer
Introduction
Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah continue to escalate in what Israel has called Operation Northern Arrows.1 In mid-September 2024, Israeli intelligence sabotaged thousands of Hezbollah beepers and walkie-talkies, detonating them in an operation that killed dozens of group members and wounded thousands more. On September 27, 2024, Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on the group’s Beirut headquarters—the culmination of a campaign against Hezbollah’s leaders that led to the killing of numerous senior group leaders in September 2024. Two days before the Nasrallah assassination, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), told Israeli troops from the Seventh Brigade deployed along the northern border, “We are preparing the process of a manoeuvre, which means your military boots . . . will enter enemy territory.”2 The IDF also called up two reserve brigades for what it referred to as “operational missions in the northern arena.”3 Israeli commandoes have conducted cross-border operations to gather intelligence and otherwise prepare for a ground invasion, and Israel has done limited operations so far in southern Lebanon.4 Iran responded by launching waves of ballistic missiles and other stand-off weapons at Israel.
To better understand the prospect of further escalation, this brief asks four questions: What are Israel’s and Hezbollah’s objectives? How has violence evolved over the past several months? What are plausible scenarios for further escalation? What options do the United States and other countries have to mitigate or prevent escalation? To answer these questions, this analysis draws on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information. It compiles data on Israeli and Hezbollah strikes along the Israel-Lebanon-Syria border and geolocates Hezbollah attacks against Israel in the demilitarized zone between the Blue Line and Litani River.
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