Israel’s onslaught against Hizbullah and its leaders reached its peak with the assassination of its Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, on 27 September.

 In this attack, it used 80 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs provided by the US, flattening dozens of high-rises in Dahiya in southern Beirut. The bombing displaced thousands of people, forcing them to camp out in the open on the pavements of seaside thoroughfares or in downtown squares due to the lack of shelter areas.

Soon afterwards, Israel began to prepare for a ground incursion into Southern Lebanon. Its stated purpose is to “cleanse,” as the Israeli leadership put it, the border area of Hizbullah forces and weapons.  

The Israeli leaders hold that decapitating Hizbullah alone is not sufficient to weaken the organisation and end the confrontation in the north.

In the aftermath of the death of their leader, Hizbullah forces fired a volley of Fadi 1, 2 and 3, Falaq 1 and 2, and Nour missiles, targeting Tiberias, Safed, and Haifa, as well as settlements as far south as the east of Jerusalem.  

On Sunday evening, the Israeli Navy announced it had intercepted a drone approaching the Karish offshore natural gas platform.

The Israeli Occupation Army has deployed five divisions for the ground incursion into Lebanon. On Monday evening, the Lebanese army announced it would deploy forces at several border points.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said that the purpose was to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701 on the security situation in Southern Lebanon. His statement came shortly after a meeting with Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri, which signified that Hizbullah approved the move.

Mikati reaffirmed Lebanon’s commitment to international efforts at the UN to bring about an immediate ceasefire. He stressed the need to elect a consensus candidate to fill the vacancy in the Lebanese presidency as soon as the ceasefire is achieved. Berri agreed with this, marking a significant shift in the position of the Hizbullah-Amal alliance, which had long insisted on backing their preferred presidential candidate Suleiman Frangieh.

The shift may be explained at least in part by the fact that Hizbullah is currently focused on a battle for survival. It has therefore delegated decisions regarding domestic politics and other affairs, such as shelter and relief efforts, medical services, and diplomatic communications, to its political allies and the government.

Mikati’s statement not only came after meeting the head of the Amal Movement but also after Hizbullah’s Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem, had delivered his first televised speech on 30 September.

Also on 30 September, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot flew to Beirut to meet with the prime minister, the speaker of parliament, the Lebanese army commander, and the Maronite Patriarch.

Barrot arrived with 11 tons of medical aid to help fill Lebanon’s medical stockpile for emergencies. He promised that additional aid from France would be forthcoming, with its distribution coordinated with the UN.

He reiterated his country’s commitment to a diplomatic solution, which he said would begin with a temporary truce that would pave the way for a comprehensive settlement within three weeks. He cautioned Israel against proceeding with its planned ground offensive and held Hizbullah partly responsible for the current situation.

Israel announced it had killed Hassan Nasrallah as soon as it had finished its daily carpet-bombing on 27 September. Sources close to Hizbullah and the Iranian Tasnim News Agency denied the news, confirming that he was safe. Israel countered that no one could have survived the heavy bombs it had used and that if Nasrallah had been in Hizbullah headquarters at the time it was bombed, he would surely have died.

When Hizbullah sent the above-mentioned barrage of missiles into Israel about three hours later, it still made no mention of Nasrallah’s fate. Subsequently, Reuters cited sources close to Hizbullah saying that they had lost contact with the secretary-general since Friday evening.

Around 20 hours later, Hizbullah officially confirmed the death of its long-serving secretary-general.

Around 1,800 people had been killed and more than 8,500 wounded in the two weeks of Israeli bombing of Lebanon up to that point, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.

During the tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel and Hizbullah since October, the two sides were constantly testing each other. After assassinating Hizbullah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike against Beirut, killing five civilians, including two children, and wounding 80 others in the process, Israel waited to see how long it would take for Hizbullah to respond.

During the interval, Hizbullah received proposals through mediators for de-escalation and a ceasefire. While it rejected the terms, it had nevertheless shown an interest in considering them before carrying out its vow to avenge Shukr’s death.   

Evidently, having gauged Hizbullah’s patterns of behaviour and response time after every escalation, Israel began to plan for a series of rapid strikes that would so overwhelm Hizbullah as to disrupt the command-level decision-making processes.  

On 26 September, Tel Aviv feigned interest in the international call for a ceasefire. The following day, after addressing the UN General Assembly in New York, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Nasrallah.

Some analysts believe that the Iranian president’s conciliatory language during the recent Israeli escalation emboldened Israel. Tehran understands how its adversaries are trying to lure it into a regional war in the weeks ahead of the US presidential elections in November.

 It calculates that falling into this trap would strengthen the chances of success of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump, whereas it would prefer the Democrats to stay in power. However, the dilemma is that its reluctance to escalate regionally to offset or mitigate the gravity of the threat to its ally Hizbullah will tip the regional balance of power even further in Israel’s favour.

The time of Nasrallah’s meeting with the Deputy Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force Abbas Nilforoushan at Hizbullah headquarters in Beirut was allegedly relayed to Tel Aviv by an Iranian agent spying for Israel.

 However, Israel’s knowledge of the location of the headquarters and its depth 30 metres below ground level was acquired through information collected by agents infiltrated into Hizbullah itself. This was crucial to determining the weight of the bombs needed to assure the death of Nasrallah inside the headquarters.

Nasrallah had repeatedly denied any human infiltration in Hizbullah’s ranks, attributing the breaches to modern espionage and surveillance technologies. However, recent reports in the Lebanese media mention the arrest of a construction contractor in Southern Lebanon for espionage.

He was described as being the brother of a senior Hizbullah leader who had previously carried out construction projects for Hizbullah-affiliated organisations. The report mentioned no names, but it hinted at the degree to which Hizbullah was compromised and suggests that Israel had recruited people who had worked on Hizbullah’s weapons depots, tunnels, or launch sites and other fortifications and installations.

As severely as Hizbullah’s leadership has been hit, the notion that this will automatically paralyse its operations is based on the assumption that its organisational structure is modelled on the vertical hierarchy of a standing army.

Hizbullah is a resistance movement that was initially organised in a decentralised and horizontal manner. It was a collection of underground cells that operated independently in Southern Lebanon before unifying under a centralised leadership to become professional as it increasingly engaged in political party politics.

Nevertheless, its military operations in the field are still primarily characterised by the independent cell structure, which largely avoids fixed and direct lines-of-command.

In his televised address on Monday, Hizbullah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem said that the leadership replacement will be smooth, as it follows structures and contingency plans that Nasrallah had devised precisely to contend with such exigencies.

Most likely, Hizbullah’s internal communications network is still uncompromised and unaffected by the recent bombings. The organisation’s wireless network is of secondary importance, only having been introduced relatively recently in tandem with its involvement in Syria outside of its customary theatres of activity.

For the purpose of resistance operations in Southern Lebanon, wireless communications are not needed, especially as conventional modes are more trustworthy.

How the situation will develop in Lebanon in the aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination remains shrouded in mystery. Will Hizbullah respond more definitively for the death of its leader? Will Israel continue to escalate and proceed with a ground offensive?

On the first question, Qassem has been vague, merely stressing that Hizbullah is ready to meet the ground incursion and prepare for a long war. This appears to be the course Hizbullah has opted for, having lost the initiative at least temporarily.

If, in the coming days, it demonstrates its cohesion and continued military capacities, Israel might hold off on or limit its ground incursion to avert losses that would diminish the impact of its recent air superiority.

However, Israel in the thrall of its triumphalist euphoria, may press ahead with a full-scale invasion in pursuit of absolute territorial and political gains without negotiation. Regardless of what strategy it opts for, it and its backers will marshal their arsenal of disinformation and deception tactics, sending out mixed messages, such as feigning an interest in diplomacy to better ensure the element of surprise before it pounces.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly