The Decibel - Israel-Hezbollah tensions escalate with deadly strikes

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Since the war in Gaza broke out in October, Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in constant military strikes. At the end of July, the violence escalated when 12 Druze children were killed by a rocket hitting a soccer field in the Golan Heights. A string of high profile assassinations followed, raising the already-high tensions in the region.Thomas Juneau is an associate professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa who specializes in security in the Middle East. He’s on the show to talk about how countries in the region are calculating their moves to avoid an all-out war. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Since October, there has been a violent back and forth between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. There have been rocket attacks, drone strikes, assassinations. At the end of July, it escalated. It began with a rocket attack that killed 12 children, followed by a series of high-profile assassinations. On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes flew over Beirut, breaking the sound barrier and shaking windows throughout the city. And Hezbollah launched drone attacks in northern Israel. All of this is fueling concerns that this might lead to a regional war. Tomas Junot is an associate professor of public and international affairs at the University

of Ottawa. Today, he's on the show to talk about the significance of what's happened over the last couple of weeks and how countries in the region are calculating their moves to avoid an all-out war. I'm Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Tomas, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So we've seen this tit for tat between Hezbollah and Israel since October, but it has really ramped up recently. What's different about what's happening right now compared to what we've seen in the past several months?

There are rules of the game between Israel and Hezbollah. There were rules of the game before October 7th, and there have been rules of the game since. These are not written on paper, but it's a sort of tacit understanding between the two sides on what is, quote unquote, acceptable in their exchange of violence and what is not. What are the red lines? The thing is that these red lines always change. They're not fixed. They're not static. So since October, obviously, these red lines have evolved quite a bit. And a lot of what we're seeing, one way to try to understand what's going on is both sides tried to push these red lines in their favor. So since October 7th, both sides have been shooting at each other a lot. That's why several kilometers wide of communities on both sides of the border have been evacuated to protect the civilians.

More recently, however, in the last couple of weeks, Israel killed one of the most senior commanders of Hezbollah, Fuad Shoker, in response to Hezbollah killing 12 children in the Golden Heights, which is a territory that Israel has occupied and annexed in what is the north of Israel. And at the same time, Israel also assassinated a Hamas commander in Iran. That's stretching the red lines a lot. I'd like to talk through this series of events that sort of brought us to where we are right now. And I think we should start with the one that sort of kicked this all off. And that was the attack on Magdal Shams, which is a predominantly Druze village in the Golden Heights. This was the attack that killed 12 children on a soccer field. What was it about this attack that sort of set this all off? So this attack is very complicated in many ways. I mean, obviously, it's tragic. I mean,

12 children died. But this being in the Golan Heights made it very sensitive because the Golan Heights is territory that Israel annexed in 1967, when there was the Six-Day War between Israel on the one side and mostly Egypt and Syria, backed by other Arab states on the other side. Israel at that time seized the Sinai from Egypt, Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel has occupied that territory since. It has annexed it. The thing, though, is that there's only one country in the world that has recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, and that's the United States, which did that under the Trump administration. And interestingly, the Biden administration never reversed that recognition. But Canada,

for example, or the EU or the rest of the countries in the world do not recognize the Golan Heights as being part of Israel. And the kids who were killed in that attack were not Israeli citizens. A lot of the Druze and other inhabitants of the Golan Heights have been offered Israeli citizenship, but many of them have refused it. So that makes the whole situation pretty complicated. Right. So what was it about this attack that kind of launched us into, you know, this escalation? The main difference is that 12 civilians died. There have been civilian casualties in the tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah since October, especially on the Lebanese side, but not on that scale. So that's 12 kids plus several that were injured on top of the 12 who were killed.

That provoked a significant wave in Israel in favor of doing something about Hezbollah. And here there's a key debate that is going on inside Israel that predates October 7th, but that has really intensified since, which is what do we do about Hezbollah, right? From Israel's perspective, Hezbollah is on Israel's northern border. It has been attacking Israel in the name of the quote-unquote resistance, right, the opposition to Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. In many cases, literally a lack of a recognition of Israel's legitimacy and its right to exist. That has intensified a lot since October 7th. So for a lot of Israelis, this provoked very much a movement in the direction of, okay, now we really

need to do something about Hezbollah. The US and Israel have both said that Hezbollah was responsible for this attack, but Hezbollah itself says that it wasn't responsible. What do you make of their response? So in the hours after that strike, a number of Hezbollah affiliated or Hezbollah loyal channels on social media, on Telegram, for example, claimed the attacker said that it was Hezbollah, but Hezbollah very quickly came out and said, no, we didn't do it. To my mind, there is no plausible reason to believe that it is not Hezbollah. Every indication is that it is Hezbollah. That being said, I have not seen indication that Hezbollah would have done this on purpose. The most plausible explanation is that Hezbollah was targeting a nearby Israeli military installation, and they missed. And tragically, they hit that soccer field.

Why would then Hezbollah deny it? Simply because Hezbollah opposes Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. Hezbollah considers that that bit of territory should go back to Syria. Therefore, in this narrative, Hezbollah killed kids who shouldn't be in Israel. So for Hezbollah, this was very awkward. This was very uncomfortable politically. And that's why they did not claim this attack. Hmm. Then Israel responds by striking Beirut just a couple of days later. This attack killed a leader in Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, who Israel said was responsible for this attack in the Golan Heights. What was the impact of that strike on

Beirut? So Fuad Shukr is one of the most senior commanders in Hezbollah. He has been a key member of Hezbollah since its inception in the early 1980s, when Hezbollah was created with a lot of Iranian and Syrian support in the context of the Lebanese civil war. He's been involved in a whole series of important attacks by Hezbollah over the years. The Americans actually had a $5 million bounty on Shukr's head, right? So that gives you an idea of how prominent a leader within Hezbollah he was. From Hezbollah's perspective, and understanding that we're very much in a tit-for-tat dynamic here, from Hezbollah's perspective, when one of its most senior commanders is killed, of course it perceives that it has to retaliate, that not retaliating will be perceived by Israel,

but also by Hezbollah's constituents as weakness and a lack of resolve. There's also very much an internal dynamic at play here, that when members of Hezbollah are killed, especially senior members, there will be pressure inside the movement, right, to defend one of our own. So this was an attack on a Hezbollah leader, but it did happen in Lebanon. Can you just remind us what the relationship is between Hezbollah and Lebanon? So that's a very complicated question to answer in a minute and a half, because it's a complicated relationship. Hezbollah, as I said a few minutes ago, was born in the 1980s, the early 80s, in the post-Civil War context, the war ended in 1990, Hezbollah refused to disarm, unlike a number of other militias and groups in that war, which allowed it to not only grow in parallel to the Lebanese armed forces, the national army,

but in fact, Hezbollah today is far more powerful than the Lebanese armed forces. But also Hezbollah, in more recent decades, has become a player involved in the governance of Lebanon. It's not just the militia that does its thing on the side. It has members of parliament that have been elected in successive elections. It has had ministers. Its political wing has been not only very active politically, it has a foreign policy. It has foreign relations all over the world with other Iran-backed groups, but also to raise funds in more or less illicit activities in West Africa and South America, even here in Canada to some extent. But also, it provides social services, which has been very essential to allow it to grow its base inside

Lebanon. And you mentioned Iranian support. And I'm just curious if you can walk us through sort of the relationship between Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas and how Iran sort of fits into this. So it's a very close relationship. And in the absence of Iranian support, Hezbollah is nowhere near, nowhere near the powerful actor it is today. Iran has very much an anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Saudi foreign policy. And the key thing about Iran is that in military terms, in conventional military terms, Iran is far weaker than the U.S. and Israel. If you think about conventional military power, tanks, fighter aircraft and things like that, in an open conventional war, the U.S. annihilates Iran. Iran is very much aware of that.

So over the decades, Iran has made the choice to support non-state armed groups, terrorist groups, in some cases, militias, insurgents, rebels, and provide them with asymmetric capabilities, mines, explosive devices, but also, you know, AK-47s and things like that. And now over the years, also missiles, rockets, and drones. So the three main groups that Iran supports like that in the region are Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and now the Houthis in Yemen. These three groups are non-state actors involved in the governance of their territories to various degrees. In conventional military terms, they're not weak, but what makes them really threatening is their missiles, their rockets, their drones. So these are symbiotic

relationships. And the last point that I just mentioned quickly here is there is a bit of a mistaken tendency in Western commentary to describe these groups, the three main ones, but also a whole bunch of smaller ones in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, as pawns or puppets of Iran. of how those relationships work. They work together. They share common interests. They share, to at least some extent, a common ideology. But it's more of a partnership and cooperation and not a top-down, you know, Iran telling people what to do type of relationship. We'll be right back. So after the strike on Lebanon, there was another assassination. Ismail Haniyeh, who was a top Hamas leader, was assassinated in Iran.

Who was Haniyeh? What was his role within Hamas? So a couple of minutes ago, we talked about how Hezbollah has political and military wings. Hamas is similar. It has political and military wings. These wings work together, right? They're not isolated from one another. It's part of one whole organization. The military wing does the fighting on the ground. The political wing does the diplomacy, the foreign relations, the negotiations with adversaries, but also all the relations with friends, right? Hamas talks and works with the Houthis and Hezbollah and Iran all the time. And you need a bureaucratic apparatus to actually manage that on a day-to-day basis. So on the ground in Gaza right now, it's the military wing that is doing

the fighting. Because the fighting is so central to what Hamas is right now, the military wing has been the most influential. The military wing is led and has been led for a while by an individual named Yahya Sinwar. Ismail Haniyeh was, until the assassination you referred to, the leader of the political wing. He has been in exile. He has been based in Qatar, in Doha, the capital, for a number of years now. And it is from there that he was managing ceasefire negotiations indirectly with Israel, but also dealing with Iran and Hezbollah and others, dealing with international actors, doing a lot of fundraising too, and things like that. So Haniyeh is the one

who was in Iran for the inauguration of the new Iranian president. And that's where that he was reported, assassinated reportedly, and there's no reason to believe otherwise, by Israel. But Israel hasn't actually taken responsibility for this assassination. No, Israel has not taken responsibility for the assassination. There's an element of plausible deniability that Israel often adopts for external intelligence operations. Historically, Israel has very often done that. But there's little reason to believe at this point that it's not Israel. And actually, there's been media reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times where unnamed American officials say that Israeli officials confirmed it to them that it's not Israel. And actually, there's been media reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times, where unnamed American officials say that Israeli officials confirmed

it to them that it was Israel. Hania was often talked about as the sort of moderating force within Hamas. Can you tell me what that means in this context? Good question. I'm happy that you asked that because there's been a lot of, I'd say, fairly pointless debate, especially on social media, right, that happens, on the issue of what is a moderate and was he a moderate in a group like Hamas. There's a number of people who have been saying there's no such thing as a moderate, they're all terrorists, which I think is a misunderstanding of what the word means and implies. In any political entity, terrorist group, criminal group, state, democracy, dictatorship, good guy, bad guy, whichever, there is always a spectrum of political views. That spectrum can be extremely broad, especially in a dynamic democracy from left to right, from far left to

far right. But even in the most brutal dictatorships in the world, let's take North Korea, there's always some daylight between individuals who are a bit more radical, a bit more conservative, or a bit more pragmatic, a bit more moderate. They want a bit more opening of the economy, a bit less, etc., etc. That's true in North Korea. It's true in Iran, where there are minor differences between senior regime individuals. And it's also true in a movement like Hamas. Of course, Haniyeh was a senior member of Hamas. He was a terrorist. He was anti-Israel. He was deeply anti-Semitic. All of these things are absolutely true, and describing him as a moderate is not meant to deny that. There are individuals in Hamas who want to fight to the end, who want to fight to the death. They

will not compromise or negotiate with Israel, period, except on a very, very tactical basis. There are other individuals within Hamas, and Haniyeh was one of them, period, except on a very, very tactical basis. There are other individuals within Hamas, and Haniyeh was one of them, who, relatively speaking, were moderates within the movement, meaning that they were more open to negotiating a ceasefire with Israel, more open to a truce, etc., without, of course, them rejecting any of Hamas's long-term objectives, which was opposition to Israel's existence. Could some of these moderates of Hamas's long-term objectives, which was opposition to Israel's existence. Could some of these moderates in Hamas have been involved at some point in the future, hypothetically, in negotiation towards a two-state solution? There's a debate at that level. I think

there's grounds to be skeptical of how possible that would be even for moderate Hamas leaders. But when we're talking about at least a ceasefire, clearly there was some tactical difference between Hamas leaders. And Hamas announced earlier this week that the replacement for Hania will be Yahya Sinwar, who you mentioned earlier. He was one of the architects of the October 7th attack and the head of Hamas in Gaza. What do you make of that? What this means is that unlike what was the case until just a few days ago, the military and political wings are fused under one individual. In practice, how much of an institutional change does that imply is not clear, but probably not that much.

But it does mean that, you know, that small daylight that I was talking about between moderates and hardliners within Hamas very much shrinks because the hardliner who's leading the war in a very intransigent way will now also be leading the negotiations. There's an ideological distinction, but there's also very much of a logistical dimension, right? Haniyeh was leading the ceasefire negotiations from Doha. He was actually physically there. The Israelis were just a few rooms away, maybe a few floors away in the same building. Now, Sinoir is going to have to coordinate ceasefire negotiations from a war zone in Gaza where he is deeply hidden in bunkers and tunnels, right? So for him to communicate with negotiators outside of Gaza will be extremely complicated and very, very slow. So now that Sinoir has sort of taken over this position, what does that mean for ceasefire talks and, you know, a potential end to this war? Tania's death is not good news for prospects for a ceasefire because he was,

keeping in mind how we mean this in relative terms, but he was a moderate within the movement, more open to some kind of ceasefire and truce with Israel. Sinoir seems less open to that. Add to that the logistical dimension that it will just be much more complicated for him to coordinate discussions. It might take days sometimes to relay messages to deep inside his tunnels and so on. That's true, but that's a very narrow reading of what's going on. in the media before the assassination of Haniyeh, prospects for ceasefire were not good, right? I did not see one as imminent in any way, and certainly not in the short term and not for a reasonable definition of a midterm. So ultimately, Haniyeh being killed doesn't fundamentally change that. So given everything we've talked about, what kind of calculations are the countries in the region making here? Iran, Israel, Lebanon, what are they balancing? So on the side of Iran and Lebanon, if we talk about Hezbollah a bit, Iran and Lebanon and Hezbollah are in a bit of an uncomfortable

situation in many ways, because they absolutely oppose Israel. They support Hamas. They support what they call the cause of resistance. They're anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Saudi, and so on. But like we said earlier on, they don't want open war. And understanding that the situation we're in now is not open war. Israel likes to call it the war between the wars. Others call it the gray zone or the hybrid war, where it's obviously not peace, clearly, but it's not open warfare, right? And by that, I mean, total war of the armies literally going at each other directly. We're in a situation of indirect or limited or gray zone or hybrid conflict. Iran wants to keep it that way. Hezbollah wants to keep it that way because in a situation of open war, they lose because again, the US and Israel are vastly more powerful in conventional

terms. And in this situation of indirect or limited violence, Iran can exploit the chaos. Iran can exploit the vulnerabilities. Iran can exploit the weaknesses of states throughout the region. That's where Iran thrives, right? And to me, Iran has been quite clear since October, and so has Hezbollah, that they want to push back at Israel. They want to hit Israel. They want to lob missiles on Israel and so on. But they are very careful to calibrate these provocations to make sure that it doesn't escalate. Do they still want that after the assassination of Ahniyya, the assassination of Shukr? I don't know.

Red lines have been pushed back so much. And a miscalculation or a spark could just lead things to explode, even if the different sides don't want it. What about the Israeli side? What sort of calculations are they making? Do they have the same desire to avoid all-out war? So that's a great question. And it's difficult to answer that. It depends who you refer to in Israel. And ultimately, I get it that there's one government

with one ultimate decision point. But within the security services and the military, there's been a lot of leaks in the media, Israeli media, American media, that the military and the security services are calling for a bit more restraint. Not because they're friends of Hamas, but because they have their hands full with Hamas. Think about it, right? It's been nine months and Hamas has not even been close to defeated yet. And now there's talk about opening a new front in northern Israel against Hezbollah, which is far more powerful than Hamas. So they're urging for more caution. They're urging for more seriousness and more investment in ceasefire talks. Obviously, in Israeli society, there's a lot of pressure for a ceasefire, especially for release

of the remaining hostages. But in the ruling coalition, there are a number of far right parties to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, who are saying the opposite, who are saying, if there's a ceasefire, we're going to quit the government and Netanyahu is going to lose his majority in parliament. So Netanyahu, who is, whether we like him or not, he's a master tactician, right, of navigating all of these competing priorities. That's what he's done for decades, that's what he's doing now. And he's under these extremely difficult to reconcile priorities. Ceasefire, stop the war, negotiate, or continue the war, because there's a serious risk that in the event of a ceasefire, he might lose some members of his coalition on the far right and lose his majority. So as you said, we're not exactly in

peace times right now, but what for you would be a sign that we're sort of crossing into a more full blown conflict? What would be the thing that you're looking for? Civilians being targeted on a large scale on different sides and putting Gaza aside for now. In Lebanon, Israel has hit civilians. In Israel, Hezbollah has hit civilians. But most of the time they tried to aim for military infrastructure. You know, when I was talking about the rules of the game, it's to try as much as possible to target military assets, commanders, troops, etc. Infrastructure.

But if we are in a scenario of escalation, that red line of trying most of the time, sort of, to focus on military targets, that becomes seriously diluted. And we are going to see on both sides, way more civilian casualties. Tomas, thank you so much for being here today and for talking us through all this. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. This episode was edited by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. And Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.