At dawn on 25 August, Hizbullah delivered its anticipated response to the Israeli assassination of its senior military commander Fuad Shukr.

After keeping the world in suspense for three weeks as to how it would respond to the assassination, the Lebanese resistance organisation unleashed a barrage of hundreds of rockets and dozens of attack drones against Israeli military bases and installations across an area extending from northern Israel to Tel Aviv.

The missiles struck 11 targets, including four in the Golan and two bases in Tel Aviv, one belonging to the Israeli Air Force and the other a secret intelligence headquarters. In doing so, Hizbullah was clearly trying to establish a new deterrence balance, making it plain that if Israel strikes a suburb of Beirut, it will hit a suburb of Tel Aviv, and if Israel targets its senior leaders, it will hit Israel’s military installations.

The dawn attack opened with a salvo of about 340 Katyusha rockets fired from several locations in Southern Lebanon with the purpose of overwhelming Israeli Air Defences.

Israel’s famed Iron Dome air defence system was thus insufficiently prepared for the next phase, being the drones which constituted the core of the attack. Although Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah did not specify the number of drones deployed, he did explain the nature of the targets in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

The main target was the secret headquarters of the Israeli Occupation Army’s 8200 military intelligent unit located within the Glilot Military Complex. According to Nasrallah, this unit was directly involved in the assassination of Shukr.

The second target in Tel Aviv was chosen primarily to be able to reach the main target. The Ein Shemer Air Base located 72 km from the Lebanese-Israeli border reportedly supplies the Glilot Complex with its main defences. Glilot is 110 km from the Israeli border with Lebanon and only 1.5 km from Tel Aviv, although within its northern suburbs.

Israel claimed to have detected Hizbullah’s preparations for the retaliation and based on this intelligence launched pre-emptive strikes. Carried out after coordinating with Washington, these involved around 100 fighter jets that bombed some 40 locations in Southern Lebanon within an approximately 10 to 15 km wide strip on the Lebanese side of the border.

Israel said it had destroyed thousands of precision launchers, thereby ruining the timing, accuracy, and force of the Hizbullah attacks, which were supposed to consist of 6,000 rockets, according to Israeli sources. Israel also claimed the attacks failed to hit important military targets in the central zone, by which it meant Tel Aviv.

The US Defence Department said it had helped identify locations in Lebanon for the strikes but denied taking active part in Israel’s pre-emptive attack. On the morning of the attack, sirens sounded across Israel telling people to head to shelters and flights were suspended for a few hours at Ben Gurion Airport.

Life returned to normal after Hizbullah announced its operation was complete.

In a televised address delivered 12 hours later, Nasrallah denied Israeli claims that it had stunted the force of the attack. Hizbullah’s response to Shukr’s assassination was executed as planned and was not affected by the Israel pre-emptive action, he said.

Nasrallah seemed convinced of the success of the plan, even though it was the first complex operation Hizbullah has carried out without Shukr’s supervision. He took pleasure in discussing the details of the operation, such as the timing, the identification of targets deep inside Israel, and the types of missiles used. But he also withheld some information, such as the types, specifications, and numbers of missiles and drones deployed.

As to why Hizbullah waited three weeks to deliver its response to Israel, Nasrallah said that the delay was to give negotiating efforts a chance to make progress. Hizbullah’s main purpose is to support the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and to give Arab mediators breathing space for the negotiations. But when the Israelis showed that they were not serious about the negotiations and were merely maneuvering, Hizbullah decided to act without further delay, he said.

Another reason for the delay was that Hizbullah did not want to rush its selections from the bank of possible Israeli targets. These would be exclusively military targets because since the mid-1990s Hizbullah has refrained from targeting Israeli civilians in order to protect Lebanese civilians. There had also been the need to put in place plans for hitting the main target, the military intelligence unit, which is responsible for intelligence communications and therefore specialises in the tracking, surveillance, and intelligence gathering Israel needs to carry out its targeted assassinations.

Nasrallah explained that targeting the Israeli Air Defence bases in the Golan and along the border had been meant to clear airspace of Iron Dome coverage so Hizbullah’s drones could reach their destinations deep inside Israel.

He denied Israel’s claims that it had acquired intelligence on Hizbullah’s plans. No information was leaked about the plans and their targets, he said. All the Israelis had seen Hizbullah troop movements some minutes before the operation began.

In its so-called pre-emptive strikes, Israel had hit many areas of Lebanon where there are no Hizbullah missiles or drones, Nasrallah said. He acknowledged the deaths of two Hizbullah fighters and one from the Amal Movement but added that Israel had only managed to take out a limited number of missile launchers and that these cost relatively little to make.

The warehouses where Hizbullah keeps its precision missiles were untouched.

Israel reported no major losses of life, apart from the death of a marine who had been in a naval vessel off the shore of Nahariya. Nasrallah denied targeting Nahariya and conjectured that the marine must have been hit by an Israeli interceptor missile.

Israel also said that the Hizbullah strikes had led to no serious material losses. An Israeli military spokesman said that Israel had intercepted most of the drones or that they had fallen in open areas. Nasrallah said that they had hit their intended targets, however, adding that the group was still assessing the damage even though Israel was making this difficult as it rarely divulges its losses.

He said that once Hizbullah gets a clearer picture, it will determine whether the damage its strikes inflicted on Israel was a satisfactory response to Shukr’s assassination. If not, it will consider a further response.

At the same time, he said that the very fact that Hizbullah had struck the 8200 base was a major success, even if the results were not evident to observers.

Both sides seemed keen to cater to the international community’s concern over whether the current exchange is over. In a later statement, Hizbullah said that it had fired all the missiles and drones it had planned to fire and that its operation had ended for the present.

In a similar spirit, Israel said that if Hizbullah’s offensive was over, Israel would be satisfied and not take further action. Hizbullah also indicated that when studying the operation and identifying targets, it had calibrated its actions carefully so as not to risk a full-scale war.

Israel, while stunned by the scale of Hizbullah’s attack, deliberately underplayed its results so as to appear the victor in this round. Such statements signal that the two sides are keen to bring the temperature down along the border and to keep their exchanges within certain bounds.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the flare up is the return to the former strategic parity between the two adversaries, thereby reestablishing the previous rules of engagement. Israel was on full alert for three weeks as it awaited the retaliation from Hizbullah and Tehran. Hizbullah had pledged to exact an earthshattering revenge for Shukr’s death, and it had to fulfil these pledges, especially given the escalation in Israel’s bombardments of Bekaa, Sidon, and other parts of Southern Lebanon.

Despite the respite after weeks of bated breath and cancelled flights to Beirut and Tel Aviv, some things are still up in the air, however. One is the question of whether Hizbullah’s response is over or not. Nasrallah was ambiguous on this point when he said that the answer depended on Hizbullah’s assessment of the actual losses Israel had incurred and added that this would take time.

Equally, if not more importantly, there is the question of whether Tehran and its allies will be content with Hizbullah’s response or whether it will still feel the need to retaliate for the assassination of late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on its territory.

With the situation on the northern front returning to the previous rules of engagement, and with temperatures rising and falling in tandem with developments in Gaza, US aircraft carriers will remain on the alert in the Eastern Mediterranean in anticipation of a retaliatory attack from Iran or Yemen.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly