The October 8th War
An unfathomable number of keystrokes (we don’t talk about spilling ink because that’s no longer a thing) was devoted yesterday to the anniversary of the October 7 massacre. Appropriately so. That attack by the Hamas terrorist organization kicked off a seven-front war that has now dragged on for a year. However, when historians look back on this conflict, October 8 may be viewed as a more significant marker.
October 8, 2023, was the day that Hezbollah, Iran’s more powerful proxy, began firing at Israel from Lebanon. The volume of fire that Israel has sustained since then is not well understood. Hezbollah has launched an estimated 10,000 rockets, missiles and drones at Israel since the fighting began. Entire swaths of Israel’s northern territory have been evacuated. The damage has yet to be assessed.
This war is still evolving. The Israelis are hammering Hezbollah relentlessly right now, with a combination of lethal air strikes and limited ground maneuvers in southern Lebanon. But this was not the case for nearly eleven months. The way the war evolved in the north was downright bizarre.
Even as Israelis sustained blow after blow from the Iranian proxy, they limited their responses to tit-for-tat, commensurate strikes. This remarkable restraint was encouraged—perhaps ordered—by the Biden White House. Under any other circumstances, the Israelis would have flattened Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, long ago. They would have carried out a massive campaign in southern Lebanon to remove the threat along their northern border.
But they didn’t. The Biden White House was petrified of a Lebanon war. The Israelis didn’t want one either. And for good reason. Hezbollah is perhaps the most deadly foe Israel has faced in its entire history. Israeli security officials believe the group’s military capabilities are on par with a mid-size European military (think Czech Republic or similar). The group has (or at least it had) an estimated 200,000 projectiles. It has precision-guided munitions. It has a fleet of underwater and aerial drones. And its fighters have trained alongside the Russia and Iranian militaries.
The Israelis have spent years trying to prevent advanced Iranian weapons from reaching Hezbollah. This was the thrust of the “Campaign Between the Wars” that Israel waged for roughly a decade before the current war erupted. The goal was to delay the inevitable. But that clock ran out on October 8.
Given the gravity of the threat and given that Hezbollah had clearly joined the war less than 24 hours after the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, there were many in the Israeli security establishment who were inclined to head north to fight Hezbollah immediately after 10/7. Biden said don’t. He set the Israelis on the path of war with Hamas in Gaza, and that postponed the inevitable for a time.
Realistically, Hamas was only going keep the Israelis busy for so long. The Iranian proxy group in Gaza is now effectively a spent force. That doesn’t mean it won’t occasionally carry out a successful rocket attack or snipe an Israeli soldier. Those things will happen. But the Israelis are now confident that it will be a decade or more before the group can rebuild, if it ever does. And that’s why the attention has turned north.
It’s hard to say exactly when the Israeli counteroffensive began. It might have been the targeted strike on terrorist mastermind Fouad Shukr in the heart of Beirut on July 31. Perhaps it was the Mossad’s ingenious exploding pager and walkie-talkie operation that killed, maimed and injured hundreds of Hezbollah commanders on September 17. Or it could have simply been the thundering series of air strikes that felled Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on September 27. It almost doesn’t matter at this point. The long-feared “war of the north” is now fully underway.
There is a temptation to say that Israel is winning this northern war. The Israelis have destroyed roughly half of Hezbollah’s significant capabilities (how that is determined is hard to grasp, but this is what Israelis who know are saying). And the group’s leadership has been utterly eviscerated. But the fight is far from over. This is evident by the sheer number of rocket, drone, and missile attacks that have been launched by Hezbollah into Israel despite the damage the group has sustained. Unfortunately, there is much more where that came from.
The scenarios the Israelis have sketched out in years past when describing the looming war now upon us have been fodder for nightmares. They include large numbers of casualties and unfathomable damage to iconic buildings, not to mention Israel’s infrastructure. Thankfully, none of that has occurred… yet. But it’s still possible. And the odds of a fiercer battle will only go up after Israel initiates military strikes inside Iran in response to last week’s barrage of ballistic missiles into Israel. Indeed, the regime will almost certainly instruct its Lebanese proxy to escalate by introducing some of its more advanced capabilities. This will only provoke Israel to strike harder. Up the escalation ladder we go.
The Biden Administration continues to try and head off a wider war. But this is a fool’s errand at this point. The war that began on October 8, one year ago, has clearly entered a new phase. The sheer intensity of it is now impossible to ignore. The Israelis are looking to deliver a knockout blow. Is that even possible?