With Hezbollah apparently on the sidelines, at least for now, is America still in range for the Iranian proxy and its patron?

Hezbollah has been famously and spectacularly neutered, contributing to Israel’s ability to execute last night’s strikes without the fear of incurring an additional missile barrage from the north. But with Hezbollah apparently on the sidelines, at least for now, is America still in range for the Iranian proxy and its patron?

It’s something to keep an eye on in the coming weeks as the Israeli campaign against Iranian nuclear sites unfolds with verbal support from President Trump. Several counterterrorism prosecutions in recent years have led to the disclosure of disturbing details about Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated operatives’ efforts to scope out strategic civilian sites to hit in the U.S. as part of a terrorism campaign, presumably for a situation like the present one.

Just as the Iranian terrorism threat in the Middle East is likened to an octopus with numerous tentacles, its efforts in the U.S. also employ multiple different actors.

Iran’s long-standing assassination efforts targeting senior U.S. officials including President Trump are, by now, well-known. Recent efforts have involved attempts by Iran’s Minsitry of Intelligence and Security and Quds Force to hire U.S.-based individuals to carry out plots, apparently finding willing partners in Eastern European gangs and American criminals for hire of the sort who have plotted to kill the Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad on multiple occasions. And last year, the FBI put out a bulletin seeking information about Majid Dastajani Farahani, an official in Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security involved in recruiting Americans for assassination plots targeting government officials.

It’s safe to wager that law enforcement will also be particularly alert to the possibility that Hezbollah could try to carry out mass-casualty attacks in the coming weeks. Members of Hezbollah’s foreign attack-planning wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization, have long worked to select targets in New York, according to the federal government.

In 2019, one of these operatives, Ali Kourani, received a 40-year prison sentence for his work to surveil and pass along information about potential targets, including John F. Kennedy International Airport. Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, noted in a statement that Kourani had conducted “surveillance on the City’s critical infrastructure, federal buildings, international airports, and even daycare centers.” Four years, later, Alexei Saab, another Hezbollah IJO agent, was convicted on charges of receiving training from the terrorist group starting in 1999. In the early aughts, prosecutors said, Saab had surveilled “dozens” of sites in New York City, including the U.N. headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Empire State building, airports, tunnels, and bridges.

All of that is just the activity of two IJO agents who were prosecuted in well-publicized cases. The public, of course, would not be aware of the full extent of the organization’s activities in the U.S. nor necessarily, to be sure, about law enforcement successes in disrupting it. But in 2017, the year that Kourani was arrested, the then-director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, said, “It’s our assessment that Hezbollah is determined to give itself a potential homeland option as a critical component of its terrorism playbook.” Whether Hezbollah’s capabilities in this regard have changed since the pager operation is not clear.