The Daily - The Slide Toward War in Lebanon

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

In the past few days, Israel has waged intense air raids in Lebanon, killing more than 600 people, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.Ben Hubbard, the Istanbul bureau chief for The Times, explains the origins of the spiraling conflict between Israel and its regional adversary Hezbollah.Guest: Ben Hubbard, the Istanbul bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Israel’s strikes on Lebanon are some of the deadliest in decades. Here is what we know about the bombardment.As Lebanon reels from Israeli attacks, the future is murky for a wounded Hezbollah.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Last week, after the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers in walkie-talkies across Lebanon, aimed at the militant group Hezbollah, the question was, what would happen next? Over the past five days, we've gotten an answer. The strikes came in waves, one after another. In a series of attacks across Lebanon, including in densely populated parts of its capital, Beirut. SIRENS Those attacks sent the country into high alert.

Thousands of people in the south have been fleeing their homes. And prompted panic among Lebanese civilians. OK, there's a lot of panic. People are making their way out of this area. A few minutes ago ago there's been another airstrike. You can see the smoke. As of Tuesday night, the death toll stood at more than 600, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with more than 27,000 people in shelters. Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard, on the origins of the spiraling conflict between Israel and its most feared regional adversary.

It's Wednesday, September 25th. So Ben, over the last several days, it really feels like we've come closer to an all out war between Israel and the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah than we've ever been. You have a long history reporting on this group and their conflict with Israel. I wonder what you've been thinking as you've been watching things develop over the past few days. So I've been watching this conflict between Hezbollah and Israel for a long, long time, and I've never seen anything like what we've seen over the last week. We had pagers blow up in the hands of people across Lebanon. The next day we had walkie-talkies blow up, also inflicting damage.

Right after that we had a very high- level assassination of a senior Hezbollah military leader and some of his comrades in Beirut in an Israeli airstrike. And then we had more than a thousand airstrikes across Lebanon, particularly in places where Hezbollah has a lot of power. And we're watching this happen and then we see the death toll just going up and up and up. And by Monday night, it was death toll just going up and up and up. And by Monday night, it was over 500 people. It included women and children.

And very soon we realized that this is actually the deadliest day in Lebanon for many, many decades. And this, of course, is very different than what we've seen over the past 11 months since October 7th, which is that Hezbollah began to fire into Israel after October 7th in solidarity with its ally Hamas. This is taking things up to a very different and very new level. Yeah, very soon after the Gaza war started, Hezbollah jumped in and started firing on Israel and the idea was to try to bog Israel down on the northern border so that it couldn't

focus entirely on Gaza. And both sides kind of had this understanding that they would continue this battle, they would strike each other, but they would try to keep things in certain bounds. They try to sort of keep it confined to the border area and not sort of let this blow up into a much bigger war. And for many, many months that worked. I mean, they basically did manage to keep it confined. And so the question as we were watching this was always, what would it take for this to

spiral out of control? And in my trips to Lebanon, talking to Hezbollah people and talking to other people close to the movement, they tended to mention three things. They talked about high level assassinations of Hezbollah leaders. They talked about strikes directly on Beirut and not just along the southern border. And they talked about the killing of large numbers of Lebanese civilians. And all of a sudden last week, the Israelis carried out this massive escalation in this battle and very quickly checked all three of those boxes. And why is that? What changed?

Well, there's a few reasons for this. One is that there's a lot of political pressure inside of Israel on the leadership. You have somewhere around 60,000 Israelis who have fled their homes in the north because they're worried about getting hit by missiles fired by Hezbollah. So there's a lot of pressure on the political leadership to find a way for these people to return home. And then as far as we can tell, the capabilities for some of the early attacks, specifically the pager explosions and walkie talkie explosions, had basically been set in motion a while ago. And we have reporting suggesting that Hezbollah had discovered this and the Israelis sort of realized they needed to use this or they were going to lose it.

So those two elements came together and we've had this astounding series of attacks on Hezbollah that have changed the entire shape of this conflict. Right. There's been this barrage of rocket fire and bombings, including in Beirut. And everything we've seen so far has indicated that there are a lot of Lebanese civilians caught in the crossfire. What are the Israelis saying that they're doing here? Well, before all of this started on Monday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

put out a video that was addressed to the Lebanese telling them basically that Hezbollah has been using them as human shields, putting rockets near their homes, sort of dragging them into this war and that all of these rockets are a threat to Israel. And so Israel was going to come in and try to take out this military infrastructure. And he asks the Lebanese to basically get out of the way. Say if you are anywhere close to anything that has to do with Hezbollah, you better leave. Which is probably very little solace for those families who've actually been affected by

this. I mean, after all, you don't necessarily know where a Hezbollah installation is. But why this move away from Gaza when Hamas is the one that attacked Israel on October 7th? For a very long time, Israel has regarded Hezbollah as one of the largest threats on its border. And even before the Hamas attack last October, Israeli officials were much more worried about Hezbollah than they were worried about Hamas. And so this has been something that kind of has been in the air for a very long time and people in the Israeli security establishment have sort of felt like we're eventually going to need to go and kind of take care of this Hezbollah problem and sort of get them off of our border. And now it seems like they've at least taken very, very significant steps

in that direction. And it's still unclear how far it's going to go. I mean, it's already gotten to be much, much bigger than it was. And now everybody is wondering what's next. Is there going to be continuous airstrikes trying to take out Hezbollah's infrastructure, military infrastructure, or is it possible that the Israelis are going to launch a ground invasion? Okay. So now that an all out war between Israel and Hezbollah is a real possibility, including, as you say, potentially even up to an invasion of Lebanon.

I wonder, Ben, if you could explain the broader context for all of this. How did these two start fighting in the first place? So as it turns out, the conflict actually dates back to a ground invasion of Lebanon. They said they didn't want to take Beirut unless they had to, but they came. In the 1980s, Israel invaded. They crossed the border in 1982 to try to get militants off of their border, and they stayed. They basically set up a military occupation of the south of the country.

The Israelis said they had one goal, to root out once and for all Palestinian bases across the border from their northern settlements. And the Shiite Lebanese, who were a majority in the south, weren't very happy to have them there. And so a group forms that came to be known as Hezbollah. Hezbollah guerrillas launched two salvos across the border from Lebanon, retaliation they say for Israel's shelling of south Lebanon on Friday. Which was, at the time, an underground resistance force trying to get these invaders off of Lebanese soil.

And they did this with the help of Iran, which provided them with support and funding, and it worked, basically. From now on in Lebanon, May the 25th will be a holiday, the National Day of Resistance and Liberation to celebrate the departure of the Israelis from the south. They became a very effective guerrilla force attacking Israeli forces and in 2000 the Israelis packed up and left. And for Hezbollah, this was a huge victory for them and something that was noticed across

the rest of the region. And they didn't stop. They continued to expand following an ideology of the resistance, which in their terminology is this sort of shared vision of these forces across the region coming together to ultimately destroy Israel. And this is very deeply rooted in religious ideology that they share with Iran. And it kind of guides them forward.

And I should mention that Israel, the United States, and other countries consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization. So at this point, Hezbollah has emerged as a clear antagonist to Israel. What's the next kind of flashpoint in this fight between these two adversaries? So Hezbollah continues to develop its role in Lebanese politics, its military capabilities.

And in 2006, some of its fighters launched a cross-border raid on Israel. They killed a number of soldiers and they captured two and bring them back to Lebanon. I'm calling to the people who kidnapped him, send us a sign of life for my son. And this sets off gigantic, devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah. A very bloody one, as I remember as I covered it. Yes. Israel had to respond to this absolutely unprovoked assault whose scale and depth was unprecedented in recent years.

Israel pummels south Lebanon and lots of Lebanese infrastructure across the country in airstrikes, launches a ground invasion, tries to come back in. Since the beginning of the war, there have been virtually no supplies being brought into Lebanon. That means that Lebanon, to all intents and purposes, has been shut off from the outside world. And this drags on for about 34 days. More than a thousand Lebanese are killed. About 150 people are killed in Israel. Hugely, hugely destructive war. The head of Hezbollah pledged to wage an open war against Israel. And Hezbollah shows itself to be an incredibly capable guerrilla force.

Forces inside Lebanon fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli border towns and a warship. They have tunnels dug in south Lebanon. They have bunkers. They use a lot of the landscape. They basically wait for the Israelis to come into these towns and villages and then sort of pop up out of nowhere,

fire anti-tank missiles, lay ambushes, and it's incredibly effective. And basically they reach a point where neither side figures they can go much further, and it brings the war to a stalemate. And even though Lebanon has been devastated by this war, Hezbollah walks out of it looking like heroes. Once again, instead of being sort of the scrappy force that fought the occupation, now they're

one of the few forces in the region that can say, we stood up against the Israeli military and stopped them from even coming in. Yeah. I remember watching those Hezbollah fighters emerge from the trenches on the day that Israel withdrew and they were really walking with the confidence of victorious men. Despite the fact that there had been massive casualties on the Lebanese side, they really were acting as though they had won. Yes, and this has an effect inside of Lebanon and in the broader region.

Inside of Lebanon, their military forces get stronger and more effective and they start to evolve into what a lot of people have called the state within a state. They have their own TV station where they broadcast the news basically of how they see the world. They start providing widespread social services mainly to their poor people in sort of their base community. And they begin to play an even stronger role in Lebanese politics, participating in parliamentary votes and government formation and things like that.

They just start becoming a bigger part of the mix. And Lebanon has an incredibly weak central state. This is a country that suffered a terrible, terrible 15 year civil war that it basically never recovered from so it does have an army, but the army is not incredibly powerful and As well as just basically not subject to anybody's control They never have to ask permission from anybody to do what they want to do So, you know they have members in Parliament and they usually have a handful of people in the cabinet But that's not what they're really interested in what they're really interested in is their broader military parliament and they usually have a handful of people in the cabinet, but that's not what they're really interested in.

What they're really interested in is their broader military project and they basically draw a very clear line around their military activities and they will not let anyone else get involved or tell them what to do or not to do. Okay, so that's on the domestic front, but you mentioned that the 2006 war and its outcome really had an effect on the broader region as well. So what was that? So Hezbollah's performance in the 2006 war really puts them on the map regionally. There's people across the region who are used to basically Arab armies being humiliated

by the Israelis. And then all of a sudden this militia stands up and stops the Israelis from invading their country. And so they kind of developed this aura as this kind of people's army. And you start seeing people flying Hezbollah flags and putting up pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. You would see it in Cairo, you could see it in Damascus and people that are against Israel and might feel that their governments are not doing enough to sort of work against Israel and then all of a sudden you have

Wow, this is the real resistance And that really raises their stock across the Arab world and they run with it Hezbollah goes through basically another Transformation and instead of just being a force focused on fighting Israel They expand into the rest of the Arab world. They start intervening in regional conflicts, sending their people abroad to help out other militias.

And this is when things start to backfire. We'll be right back. So Ben, what does it look like when Hezbollah expands its footprint in the Middle East? Tell me about that. So you'll remember that from the early days, Hezbollah is very close with Iran. And Iran has this idea of the axis of resistance. So you'll remember that from the early days Hezbollah is very close with Iran and Iran has this idea of the axis of resistance. The axis of resistance is supposed to be this network of forces throughout the Arab world that are opposed to the United States and that are opposed to Israel and are trying

to push back on their interests in the region. So these forces exist in different countries and Hezbollah is kind of the senior member. They're sort of like the older brother of all of these other militias. Everybody looks up to them and sort of see them as this experienced party that can kind of help them get their act together. And after 2011, this axis starts to take off. And Hezbollah is really the connective tissue. Hezbollah starts sending out experts and they start sending out fighters.

In less than a year, Hezbollah has turned the tables for Syria's once beleaguered president, Bashar al-Assad, their Shia ally. They get involved in Syria's civil war. They go to try to help the government of Bashar al-Assad put down a rebellion against his rule. The group is now perceived as killing Sunni civilians inside Syria on Iran's request. And they train fighters there and they work alongside them and many of them participate in battle. We may not have spoken about Iraq before but we have a later they send fighters to Iraq. They send fighters and trainers to Yemen.

Let's go to any place where we can fight this threat that is threatening our Muslim nation and our region. So they're kind of freelancing in a way around the Middle East. Yes, yes, exactly. And many of the Arab governments are watching this happen and sort of wondering why this group that claims to be focused on fighting Israel is suddenly popping up and trying to help Iran out. And worse than that, Hezbollah is actually killing other Arabs.

They are fighting on behalf of the Syrian government and they're killing people on the other side. And so it begins to tarnish Hezbollah's regional standing and its regional reputation. So that's a very big shift in a very short period of time for Hezbollah. Yeah, it's a big shift and there's a somewhat similar shift that takes place around the same time inside of Lebanon. Lebanon as I said before has an incredibly weak central state and the country basically starts to fall apart.

A tragedy is unfolding in Lebanon. Inflation has driven the country's currency to historical lows. The economy starts falling apart. The banking system begins to fail. A tax on banks everywhere and people demanding their money. They've been locked out of their accounts since the financial crisis began in late 2019. People are going to the banks and trying to get their money out and the banks basically say we don't have your money anymore.

Wow. The state electricity network has again collapsed. A lack of fuel forced Lebanon's largest power stations to shut down. There's an electricity crisis where people are going for days without electricity. I mean it gets to be very, very miserable and it creates a lot of anger against this political establishment that's been ruling Lebanon for a long time. So in 2019, a protest movement begins to try to get rid of them. Protests.

1.5 million people, that is a quarter of the population, have taken to the streets over the last five days. People chant revolution, revolution, we want the fall of the regime. People pour into the streets, they come out in downtown Beirut and in other cities basically calling for a toppling of the regime. We need to get rid of these people who've been running our country because they've done such a terrible job.

And interestingly, many of them consider Hezbollah as part of this establishment. People come out and they chant against Hezbollah the way that they chant against the other political parties. And they very much see them as players in this corrupt system that has brought the country to this kind of breaking point. So in other words, by 2023, Hezbollah is much diminished. And yet when it comes to October 7th, when Hamas attacks Israel, Hezbollah behaves very much in a way that is not diminished.

It actually starts attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Why does it do that? So this actually fits in very well with Hezbollah's sort of more recent activity of trying to strengthen this axis of resistance, trying to work with these other anti-Israel forces in the region. So Hamas attacks Israel. Hamas is a member of the Axis of Resistance. Israel goes to war with Hamas. And Hezbollah says basically we need to help Hamas out.

And that's what gets us into what we saw over the last 11 months, this sort of low boil war along the Lebanon-Israel border. And then all of a sudden we hit this last week and it all falls apart. Israel launches this massive escalation and Hezbollah doesn't seem to have seen it coming at all. Walk me through what Hezbollah's response has been so far. In terms of statements, it's been largely defiance. Hezbollah leaders have come out. They've promised to keep fighting. They promised to get vengeance against Israel for these attacks. Militarily, it's been more of the same.

They are still launching missiles and rockets across the border at Israeli targets. There has not been significant damage or significant casualties reported on the Israeli side. And I think everybody sort of expected that because of Hezbollah's capabilities, if something like this happened, they would be able to mount a really large response and they haven't.

And people are still trying to figure out exactly why that is. Is that because they're just unable to do it either because too many of their people on the border have been wounded or killed? Is it because they can't communicate enough to organize sort of a broad attack? Or is it that they're kind of wishing that they could take things back to the way that they were last month where, you know, they can have this war going with Israel and they're hitting things, but it's not sort of escalating into this gigantic war.

So just tying all of this together, Ben, what do you make of Hezbollah's position here? The group is just in a much different place than the sort of hero status that it used to have when it was the one standing up to Israel and winning. They are in a much, much different place, both in the region and in Lebanon. Around the region, I think that there's a lot of sadness about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and I think people are very concerned about the damage that's being done in Lebanon, but you hear much less sort of sadness about Hezbollah.

I don't see a lot of people sort of mourning that Hezbollah has taken these hits. And I think that's because there were a lot of people in the region that were sort of fed up with what they had been up to. And inside of Lebanon as well, I think that, you know, there had always been this idea that Hezbollah is there to defend us from Israel and to resist against Israel. But during this war, you know,

there were definitely a lot of Lebanese who sort of asked, why did you get us involved in this? Why are you dragging Lebanon into Hamas's war? And so I think people are worried about what Israeli action could do, whether there's gonna be a ground invasion, how that's gonna be terrible for the country. But I don't think that is a lot of people worried

about what it means for the future of Hezbollah. LAUREN So, Ben, is it possible that given all of this, you know, Hezbollah's weakened stature domestically and in the region, and their loss of key leaders in these most recent round of attacks, that there might actually be a real chance here that Israel could achieve its goal of incapacitating Hezbollah,

this threat that they fear most. It's very hard to predict where this is going, but I can throw out a few ideas. It seems quite clear that Hezbollah today is not what it was, that it has been hit incredibly hard as an organization on multiple levels. This includes taking out many senior leaders

with lots of experience. This includes taking out a lot of middle management. And it includes hitting the rank and file. And so really across the structure, this is an organization that has taken a deep, deep blow. And from what we've seen so far, they're either not capable or choosing not to respond militarily

to what the Israelis have done. So that suggests that the organization is damaged and that it could be more difficult for them to move forward. But in terms of the question of, you know, has Israel achieved or could it achieve what it sets out to do, I think that's a much different question. Israel has tried to get quiet on its northern border by invading Lebanon before twice and it has not worked. And if you make a comparison with Hamas, Israel has been at war with Hamas now for 11 months.

Hamas is by all accounts a less sophisticated, less experienced fighting force than Hezbollah. They're also basically trapped inside of Gaza. They have closed borders. They can't move in and out and bring equipment in and out the way that they would like to. And Israel has still really struggled to try to destroy this organization as they set out to do. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is more sophisticated.

It has the open borders of Lebanon to rearm, to move fighters, and to do other kinds of logistics. So even though serious damage has been done to this organization, it's premature to conclude that we've reached its demise. Ben, thank you. Thank you. On Wednesday, in a sign of defiance, Hezbollah fired a ballistic missile at Tel Aviv, the first time the group had fired so deeply into Israeli territory. The missile, which Hezbollah said was aimed at Israel's intelligence agency, was ultimately

shot down by Israel's military and caused no damage or injuries. Meanwhile, Israel's attacks into Lebanon continued. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Here's what else you should know today. My fellow leaders, let us never forget, some things are more important than stain and power. It's your people. In his final speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Biden made a full-throated defense for America's continued involvement in conflicts

in Europe and the Middle East, framing his four years in office as part of a vital effort to safeguard democracy. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we could have stood by and merely protested. But Vice President Harris and I understood that that was an assault on everything this institution is supposed to stand for. Speaking on the United States defense of Ukraine against Russia's invasion, the president said that America and its allies had, quote, ensured the survival of Ukraine as a free nation, but warned that Ukraine's power to hold off Russia could be fleeting.

Innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell. Thousands and thousands of kills including aid workers. Too many families dislocated, crowding in the tents, facing a dire humanitarian situation. On the Middle East, Biden made a point of highlighting civilian casualties in Gaza and said Israel and Hamas should sign on to his ceasefire and hostage plan, while also reiterating his long-held position that Israel has the right to defend itself. But he refrained from weighing in with specifics on Israel's actions in Lebanon, saying only

that his administration was, quote, determined to prevent a wider war, and that even as the situation had escalated, he believed that a diplomatic solution was still possible. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn, Will Reed, Rachelle Bonja, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Mark George, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Niemesto, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. Special thanks to Ewan Ward, Quaida Saad,

Christina Goldbaum, and Vivian Yee. That's it for the daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.