Tensions between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, already high since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, have risen sharply in recent days. Forty-eight hours after the deaths of 12 Druze children, killed by rocket fire on July 28 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israel conducted a strike on the outskirts of Beirut to eliminate Fouad Shukur, one of the Shiite movement's most senior military officers, considered by the Israelis to be responsible for the attack. The reaction of Hezbollah's leader, who promised a "well-studied retaliation" and said "we are facing a major battle," has some observers fearing a regional escalation.
Let's take a look back at the key dates in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, for a better understanding of the conflict between Israel and the Shiite militia from Lebanon.
The history of Hezbollah ("Party of God") is inextricably linked to the armed resistance against Israel. The Shiite Islamist movement was created in June 1982 in reaction to "Operation Peace for Galilee," when Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to eliminate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had taken up refuge there since the 1960s. Supported by the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose model it adopted, Hezbollah proclaims in its founding doctrine: "Our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated." Even before the creation of the movement, several of its founders were already involved in the fight against Israeli interventionism in Lebanon.
Despite the departure of the PLO command from Lebanon to Tunisia at the end of the summer of 1982, the Israeli army decided, in order to guarantee its own security, to stay on and occupy a large part of the south of the country it shares a border with, as well as the capital, Beirut. Hezbollah became its main adversary. "Until then, Israeli interventionism in Lebanon had focused on the Palestinians living there," said May Maalouf, an expert in geopolitics and researcher specializing in Middle East conflicts. "With the departure of the PLO, we have clearly entered a Hezbollah-Israel war."
From 1985 onward, clashes increased in southern Lebanon, when the creation of Lebanon-based Hezbollah was officially announced. Hassan Nasrallah, who took over the leadership of the militia after the assassination of Abbas al-Mosawi by Israel in 1992, refocused his troops on guerrilla warfare, targeting Israeli soldiers and their proxies in the South Lebanon Army (SLA), a pro-Israeli militia made up of Shiites and Lebanese Christians. Israel retaliated through deadly offensives, such as "Operation Accountability" (1993) and "Operation Grapes of Wrath" (1996), which killed hundreds of Lebanese and displaced over 500,000 civilians throughout the country.
On May 25, 2000, after more than two decades of occupation, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. "The demand by Israeli society for withdrawal was very strong, and the many humanitarian and military defeats favored this choice," said Maalouf.
With this withdrawal, Israel acknowledged the failure of its intervention in Lebanon, leaving Hezbollah in a position of strength. Nasrallah declared the day to be "a historic victory, the first since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict over 50 years ago." He predicted: "The era of defeat for the Arabs is over and the era of victory for them is beginning, while for the Zionists the era of false victories is over and the era of defeat is beginning."
The period following the withdrawal was generally calmer, despite isolated attacks and occasional incursions into Israeli territory. The militia affirmed its place in Lebanese politics by joining the government for the first time in 2005. Nonetheless, it refused to renounce armed struggle against Israel, claiming that the Shebaa Farms, a 25-square-kilometer piece of land adjacent to the Golan Heights and normally under Syrian control, was still under occupation.
In July 2006, tensions between Israel and Hezbollah escalated once again when the Lebanese militia entered Israel and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah chief Nasrallah justified his attack as stemming from the desire to obtain a bargaining chip for the release of prisoners.
Israel immediately retaliated with air strikes, an air and naval blockade and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. In just 33 days, the fighting claimed the lives of 1,200 Lebanese people, mostly civilians, and displaced a million people. On the Israeli side, the death toll rose to 165, mainly military, and 500,000 people were displaced. Never has the human toll been so high on both sides after such a short period of time.
According to Maalouf, "There was a mentality of attacking for the sake of attacking: Both camps wanted to show domestically that they were still present and strong. We were less involved in political-border tactics, as we used to be. Hezbollah was seeking to maintain the visibility it had begun to lose since 2000. Israel wanted to demonstrate its ability to protect its borders by invading southern Lebanon."
In 2011, civil war broke out in Syria between the ruling army and groups opposed to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. In this internal conflict, Hezbollah sided with the Syrian government, calling the revolution a "conspiracy to destroy the alliance with Assad against Israel." By taking control of several Syrian villages and fighting alongside the Syrian army from the outset, Hezbollah was clearly taking part in the conflict. "This was part of the change in Hezbollah's strategic positioning in the region," said Maalouf. "It was one of the movement's first effective interventions on the ground. Through this war in Syria, Israel was an indirect enemy."
Nasrallah made no secret of the fact. In 2013, he said that Hezbollah could not afford "for Syria to fall into the hands of the United States, Israel or Takfir [Sunni fundamentalist] groups." Following Lebanon-based Hezbollah's entry into Syria, groups opposed to the Assad regime sent rockets into the Beirut region and asked Lebanese fighters to leave their territory. Despite its official position of neutrality, Israel also became involved in the civil war in January 2013, targeting Hezbollah areas with air raids.
For many years, direct confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel was limited to isolated acts. Then came the Hamas attacks on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023, which killed almost 1,200 people. In retaliation, Israel started bombinh the Gaza Strip the very next day. In support of Hamas, the Lebanese Shiite movement fired its first rockets at Shebaa Farms, a territory in southern Lebanon annexed by Israel in 1967. The Israeli army then launched artillery and drone strikes against Hezbollah positions in the Golan Heights, also occupied by Israel.
According to a tally compiled by Agence France-Presse from various sources, the violence since October 8, 2023, between the Israeli army and Hezbollah has left at least 527 people dead in Lebanon, most of them combatants, and killed 46 in Israel, half of them soldiers. On both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border, there have also been 160,000 displaced persons.
While the fighting has intensified in recent months, threats have also ratcheted up between the two sides. In June 2024, Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Kassem claimed that any expansion of the conflict in Lebanon would cause "devastation, destruction and displacement" in Israel. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to turn Beirut "into Gaza" in the event of an all-out war with Lebanon.
Has the current escalation of tensions made this scenario likely? Maalouf said this prospect does not seem plausible "in the immediate future." She believes that "no one has an interest in this happening. Neither Hezbollah, because it would be weakened, nor Israel, already in trouble internationally, nor Iran, which could not fight an ally of the US." This, in any case, is the hope of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who in a statement on July 21 condemned the "bellicose rhetoric" between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah, fearing that Lebanon could become "another Gaza."
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.