Israeli airstrikes that worn out Hezbollah’s prime management and left its inner safety in tatters are a devastating blow to Iran’s decadeslong undertaking of wielding energy in the Middle East via proxies, former U.S. intelligence officers and analysts say.
In a matter of weeks, Iran and its most vital proxy, Hezbollah, have suffered catastrophic safety failures. Israel sabotaged the group’s communications, took out a number of senior figures and killed Hezbollah’s highly effective and influential longtime chief, Hassan Nasrallah, who can't be simply changed.
U.S. officers mentioned the Israeli airstrikes, which continued Sunday, took out most of Hezbollah’s management and destroyed a number of weapons depots, inflicting unprecedented injury, each bodily and psychological, to the militia group.
Follow stay updates on the Israel-Hezbollah battle
The Iranian regime considered Hezbollah as a cornerstone of a method to outflank militarily superior adversaries with armed proxies, funded and skilled by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Tehran dubbed the “axis of resistance.”
Equipping Hezbollah with an arsenal of rockets and missiles, together with different teams in Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, Iran gambled that it may steadily weaken Israel and the U.S. and flex its muscle whereas avoiding a direct confrontation that it couldn't win.
But Iran’s technique underestimated how Israel would reply to the Hamas terrorist assault of Oct. 7 and subsequent cross-border rocket hearth from Hezbollah. Tehran additionally overestimated the power of its proxy community, former intelligence officers and counterterrorism analysts mentioned.
“Basically, their whole calculation has been torn to shreds,” mentioned terrorism knowledgeable Bruce Hoffman, a professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. “For Israel, this is a stunning turnaround from the events of almost a year ago.”
Hoffman was referring to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack that caught Israel’s intelligence agencies off-guard, killed 1,200 Israelis and resulted in 250 people being taken hostage. “Israeli intelligence has restored their aura of deterrence,” Hoffman said. “They lost it after the 10/7 debacle.”
Israel turned its focus to Hezbollah after it severely damaged Hamas in the Gaza Strip over the last year. Israeli military operations there are believed to have killed thousands of the group’s fighters and destroyed large parts of its vast network of tunnels.
However, Yahyah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, is believed to be alive and hiding in tunnels that Israeli forces have not yet seized. Israel’s government also has faced international condemnation over the high civilian casualty toll from its operations in Gaza, with more than 42,000 Palestinians killed, according to Palestinian health officials.
The Iranian proxy group that has avoided major damage since the Oct. 7 attack is the Houthi forces in Yemen. With support from Tehran, they have continued to attack U.S. military vessels and commercial shipping in the Red Sea and to launch missiles at Israel.
On Sunday, Israel’s military said dozens of its aircraft bombed power plants in Yemen and a seaport at Hodeida in retaliation for a Houthi missile attack on Israel. The impact of those attacks remains unclear.
Although Hezbollah has been under relentless attack in recent days, Iran has proved incapable — and possibly unwilling — to protect its protégés in Lebanon. That could raise questions for some fighters in Iran’s proxy groups about whether Tehran is a worthy patron, former intelligence and defense officials said.
Tehran’s network of proxies was supposed to serve as a deterrent to a direct Israeli attack on Iran itself, said Matthew Savill of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, who was a senior official in the U.K.’s Defense Ministry.
But Savill said recent events have “exposed the weakness at the heart” of Iran’s proxy strategy. “While Iran will use its partners in defense of itself,” he said, “the reverse is not true, and it is unlikely to go to war with Israel to save one of those partners.”
Glenn Corn, a former senior CIA officer, agreed. “Iran, so far, has been unable to do anything significant to back up the proxies,” said Corn, now the senior director of Geopolitics and Global Threat Assessment at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.
Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto by way of Getty Images file
Israel’s skill to efficiently strike Hezbollah's interior circle follows years of intelligence work since 2006, when Israel tried and failed to kill Nasrallah and completely defeat the militia, Corn and different former intelligence officers mentioned. Long-term intelligence work is “paying off,” Corn added.The profitable Israeli operations have additionally compelled Iran and Hezbollah to face a vexing query: how and when to retaliate with out struggling but extra setbacks?
If Iran or Hezbollah chooses to unleash a barrage of rockets and missiles on Israel now, it dangers large retaliation by Israel and a full-blown battle that Tehran is ill-equipped to win.
There can also be the threat that Israeli and U.S. forces in the area will down many of the missiles, as occurred in April, when Iran fired greater than 300 drones and missiles at Israel with nearly no impact.
For a brand new Iranian president who says his authorities is prepared to revive nuclear diplomacy with the West, a spiraling battle with Israel would torpedo any likelihood of negotiations or sanctions reduction wanted to revive Iran’s economic system.
If Tehran opts not to retaliate, although, Iran will look weak and seem to be retreating from Israel. The nation’s 85-year-old supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “is now in a dilemma of his own making,” analyst Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on social media.
“By not responding strongly, he keeps losing face. By responding too strongly, he could lose his head,” Sadjadpour wrote, including that “these humiliations will fuel talk about succession in Tehran.”
Another choice for Iran and Hezbollah could be to perform terrorist assaults abroad, going after extra weak tender targets related to Israel and the U.S. round the world, former officers mentioned.
“The one concern we should have is a return to the old kind of terrorist game, soft targets such as embassies overseas, both Israeli and U.S.,” mentioned Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA official. “Certainly that would be a much more plausible scenario.”
For Israel, flush with success in opposition to Hezbollah, there's a threat that overconfidence may lead Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order a floor invasion of Lebanon, former officers mentioned.
Israel’s earlier navy incursions into Lebanon, most just lately in 2006, backfired badly, and the sight of Israeli troops on Lebanese soil may present a shot in the arm to Hezbollah’s forces and trigger, former intelligence officers mentioned.
In Beirut, the disarray inside Hezbollah and the absence of a powerful chief are seemingly to create a vacuum, Corn mentioned. And it's unclear whether or not the Lebanese authorities will attempt to reassert itself after having been dominated for years by Hezbollah.
“Who’s going to fill that vacuum? Is it going to be the Lebanese state? Is it going to be ISIS? Is it going to be some other group?” Corn requested. “A big question is if the Lebanese Armed Forces are ready to step in and take control of their country, which they have been unable to do up until now, because Hezbollah has been the number one military and political force in Lebanon.”
Iran’s first process might be to rebuild Hezbollah and its different proxies, mentioned Norman Roule, who labored for 34 years at the CIA and oversaw intelligence on Iran.
Despite the critical injury, “the groups survive, and their hold on their respective geographies has not diminished to the point where their survival is in question,” Roule mentioned. “Iran’s primary goal will be to assist in the survival and recovery of these groups.”
Israel’s marketing campaign has eliminated a technology of Hezbollah’s management, together with lots of of key subordinates, added Roule, now on the advisory board of United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit group that claims it combats the threats posed by Iran. As lengthy as Israeli assaults proceed, Hezbollah’s decision-making might be in disarray, however the militia stays a major power.
“Dozens, if not hundreds, of lower- to mid-level commanders remain,” Roule mentioned, “along with thousands of often armed supporters.”
