Israel’s ultimatum to Hezbollah: Back off or go to war

Israel is rotating its attention to its border with Lebanon as the Gaza Strip battlefield becomes static, launching an aggressive series of attacks that have devastated Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. This past week’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks revealed that Israel has deeply compromised Hezbollah’s communication systems, while an airstrike on Beirut that killed much of the leadership of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force showed how Israel’s intelligence capabilities continue to expose the group’s top operatives.

The U.S. has been pushing for a diplomatic solution that would have Hezbollah agree to voluntarily move its force several miles off the Israeli border and back toward a line agreed to after their 2006 war. That agreement is enforced by United Nations peacekeepers, who have been unable to keep Hezbollah out.

Israeli officials said those talks are hitting a dead end, and time is running out to find a solution other than war to stop Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks.

The drumbeat of stepped-up strikes are part of what Israeli officials say is a new approach to its nearly yearlong conflict with Hezbollah, fought initially in the background of Israel’s war against Hamas militants in Gaza but increasingly taking center stage.

Tens of thousands of civilians on either side of the border have been displaced by the fighting. Israel’s government is coming under increased pressure to stop Hezbollah’s attacks and let more than 50,000 residents evacuated from the north return to their homes, a situation that Israel sees as a loss of sovereignty. Earlier this past week it added that to its official war goals.

“We cannot leave the north the way it is," Nir Barkat, Israel’s economy minister, said in an interview. “I don’t think that Hezbollah will volunteer to move to the north. So there’s another part of the war ahead of us."

Israeli officials have been cautious about declaring open war on Hezbollah, but striking at senior Hezbollah leadership in the heart of their stronghold in Beirut—the Dahiyeh neighborhood—was intended to send the message that Israel doesn’t see such escalatory action as a red line, an Israeli official said on Saturday.

Until now, Israel and Hezbollah have fought by informal rules that lay out where the two foes can attack, which types of weapons they can use, and whether civilians or combatants are killed. Strikes on Dahiyeh go beyond these so-called rules of the game.

“If Nasrallah escalates, then the price he’ll pay in Dahiyeh in Beirut will be very high," the official said, referring to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel won’t hold back from striking again at Hezbollah’s nerve center, the official said.

Israel’s strategic shift is geared toward shaking up a cross-border conflict that has been costly to both sides but has no clear diplomatic off ramp. Hezbollah has pledged to continue attacking Israel until the fighting ends in Gaza, but cease-fire talks have been fruitless for months and are currently stalled. Hezbollah began firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks that sparked the war in Gaza.

Israel had sought to avoid a war while the fighting in Gaza was in full swing, and its troops were exhausted by the fight. But as activity on that front has wound down, Israel has been pushing the envelope in the north, Israeli military officials and regional analysts said.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, visited troops at a northern Israel air base in recent days and told them to prepare for a tough fight. “The center of gravity is moving northward," he said.

For months Israel has been pounding the Lebanese militant group with increasingly elaborate covert operations, airstrikes deep into its territory, and targeted killings of top officials in strikes on Beirut that once would have been off-limits under the two combatants’ long-understood rules of the conflict.

In late July, Israel killed the top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike on a building in Dahiyeh. Last month, it sent more than 100 warplanes to conduct a heavy, pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah rocket positions in Lebanon.

It has also hit targets abroad linked to Iran’s support for the group. Israel killed a group of senior Iranian military officials in a strike on a diplomatic building in Damascus in April. This month, it launched a commando raid on an Iranian-controlled facility in Syria suspected of making weapons for Hezbollah.

The attacks have created a steady upward creep in cross-border violence, as Hezbollah also ratchets up its responses. More than 1,000 rockets were fired at Israel from Lebanon in both July and August, up from about 300 a month at the start of the year, according to data from Israel’s Shin Bet security service and the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank. Two hundred of them were fired Friday, ahead of Israel’s strike that killed the senior Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil and more than a dozen others, the Israeli military said.

“We are in a war that’s getting more and more intense every day," said Giora Zaltz, head of the Israeli regional district bordering Lebanon, which has been decimated by the war. “From day to day, the war in the north just grows."

About 8,500 projectiles have been fired into Israel from Lebanon since the start of the conflict, according to the Israeli military. In the same period, Israel has attacked more than 7,600 sites in Lebanon, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a U.S.-based, nonprofit monitoring service, and the Institute for National Security Studies.

In a sign of seriousness, Israel this past week said it was moving its 98th Division of paratroopers and commandos from Gaza to its northern border. That came shortly after forces already deployed in the north completed exercises simulating combat in Lebanon. Several reservists received calls in recent days with orders to report for duty in the north.

Nasrallah warned Thursday that if Israel were to invade Lebanon, it would be bogged down in the fighting. “We hope Israel enters Lebanon, we are waiting for their tanks day and night, we say welcome," he said in a televised address.

Reflecting the rise in tensions, the Pentagon said Friday the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman would head to the eastern Mediterranean on Monday. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group is already in the region. Senior U.S. military officials worry that Israel could soon launch a ground war in Lebanon.

For years, before the current conflict started, Israel avoided stepping up direct confrontation against Hezbollah for fear of triggering an escalatory cycle. While Israel frequently struck at weapons transfers to Hezbollah in Syria over the past decade, it was careful to avoid killing Hezbollah members.

Israeli officials now say that strategy let Hezbollah rearm and entrench itself following the 2006 war.

In the past year, Israel has killed 500 Hezbollah fighters, many of them senior.

The two sides are still holding back. Hezbollah has the ability to strike across the entirety of Israel with precision-guided missiles but hasn’t. An Israeli military official said most exchanges of fire are still contained within a few miles of either side of the shared border. But both sides’ calculations are changing fast.

“Those red lines no longer exist," said Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and expert on Hezbollah. “Things dramatically changed in these rules of the game."

Marcus Walker and Michael Amon contributed to this article.