After successes, Israel’s military is in a ‘long game’ with no clear outcome

A United Nations peacekeeper in the south Lebanon village of Yarine, on July 13, 2024. A year after perhaps the worst military and intelligence debacle in the country’s history, its armed forces have regained the momentum. The question facing Israel, experts said, is how to translate military victories into long-term diplomatic settlements. (Diego Ibarra Sánchez/The New York Times)

By Isabel Kershner

When thousands of Hamas-led gunmen breached the Gaza Strip border last Oct. 7 and overran Israeli communities, army bases and a music festival, victims of the surprise assault sent desperate messages to loved ones from their hiding places and safe rooms.

“Where is the army?” they asked as they waited long hours to be rescued. For the many hundreds of those killed, the army came too late, if at all.

A year after perhaps the worst military and intelligence debacle in Israel’s history, the military is rehabilitating its image as a formidable regional power. It has penetrated the most secret and secure bastions of its archenemies with intelligence-based precision strikes, eliminated key leaders, pounded away at their assets, and largely thwarted their efforts to mount a response.

In a bombing Friday, Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, with a strike on an underground bunker in a dense urban area near Beirut where the militant group holds sway. The military code name for the operation was New Order, hinting at Israel’s ambitious goals of changing the reality across its borders and undermining Iran’s use of proxies to surround it with a so-called ring of fire.

Now fighting on multiple fronts, Israel’s air defenses, with help from U.S.-led allies, largely blocked a huge retaliatory attack Tuesday when Iran fired a barrage of nearly 200 missiles at Israel.

Israel’s vow to make Iran pay a heavy price for that attack suggests that the Israeli military is becoming less reluctant to engage in a broader regional war.

According to Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “The strong and smart Israel from before Oct. 7 is back.”

Nasrallah’s demise sent a message of its own to Israel’s enemies, Orion added: “You understand Israel can get to you.”

The killing of Nasrallah gave an immediate lift to Israeli morale and to the military’s reputation before the bleak anniversary of the October fiasco. After the military confirmed the death Saturday, videos circulated of lifeguards announcing the news and sunbathers cheering on Israeli beaches.

A survey conducted this week by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University showed that 87% of Israel’s Jewish population had high or very high confidence in the military. Only 37% expressed such levels of trust in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Initial Israeli euphoria aside, Orion said the military actions were a “long game” with no clear outcome. After a string of successes for Israel in Lebanon in recent days, he said, the question is, “Then what?”

Over the past year, after recovering from the initial shock of the Hamas-led assault, the Israeli military has conducted a grinding and deadly counteroffensive in Gaza. Israel said recently that it had largely dismantled Hamas’ military infrastructure, reducing the militants’ capabilities to that of a guerrilla force.

That has come at a heavy price. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The toll has brought Israel international opprobrium. And despite Netanyahu’s insistence on “absolute victory,” even the military’s chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, says it is not possible to eliminate Hamas as an ideology and a movement.

Israel’s bombing has included campaigns in neighboring Lebanon, where Hezbollah began firing at Israeli positions on Oct. 8 last year in solidarity with Hamas, and in Yemen, more than 1,000 miles away, after the Iran-backed Houthis fired missiles and drones at Israel.

A strike in April on an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus, Syria, killed senior Iranian military and intelligence officials and prompted Iran to attack Israel directly for the first time in April with hundreds of missiles and drones. Then, too, Israel intercepted most of them with the help of the United States and other allies. In July, Israel killed a top Hezbollah military commander in Lebanon and Hamas’ political leader while he was visiting Tehran, Iran. In September, thousands of Hezbollah operatives were killed or maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies simultaneously exploded, and Israeli warplanes bombarded thousands of targets in Lebanon.

Since the attack that killed Nasrallah, Israel has continued striking to try to degrade as many Hezbollah assets as possible, along with some other targets in Lebanon where it began ground operations this week.

John Kirby, a White House national security spokesperson, told ABC last weekend that Israel had nearly eradicated Hezbollah’s command structure and destroyed thousands of its missiles and drones. “There is no question that the Hezbollah today is not the Hezbollah” of even a week ago, he said.

Israel’s display of military and technological prowess has also most likely helped to reestablish it as an “anchor of strength” in the region and as a balance against Iran and its proxies, according to Yaakov Amidror, an Israeli former major general and former national security adviser.

Whereas Hamas caught Israel off guard last October, the country’s forces were prepared for the Lebanon campaign. Nearly a decade ago, the military warned about Hezbollah’s embedding military infrastructure in southern Lebanese villages close to the border with Israel.

And unlike Israel’s stated aim of destroying Hamas’ military and governing capabilities in Gaza, the government set a more modest goal for the campaign in Lebanon: to allow the roughly 60,000 residents of Israeli border areas evacuated last October to return to their homes.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has said that the war against Hezbollah will proceed in stages, giving the group a chance to back down at each point and move its forces from the border. On Tuesday, Israel’s military said it had carried out dozens of secret raids in Lebanese territory near the border in recent months and had embarked on the ground operation in southern Lebanon.

After that, experts said, Israel’s end game is unclear.

The question facing Israel, experts said, is how to translate military victories into long-term diplomatic settlements.

The trick, said Orion, “is to find an exit before the inflection point when things can start going wrong.”

For now, he said, “We are still in the middle of the movie.”