Israel and Hezbollah step back from the brink of wider war — for now

Analysis by Tamara Qiblawi, CNN

(CNN) — For nearly a month, people in Lebanon and Israel braced for a wider war. A deadly rocket strike from Lebanon last month on the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was followed by an Israeli retaliatory strike that killed Hezbollah’s top commander, Fu’ad Shukr, in southern Beirut.

The powerful Iran-backed group vowed to respond. The threat triggered a slew of flight cancelations on both sides of the border, a chorus of governments imploring their citizens to leave Lebanon and Israel, and a breathless diplomatic effort to avert an escalation that Western governments feared would spark a regional conflict.

On Sunday morning, Hezbollah said it had delivered its anticipated response by launching hundreds of drones and Katyusha rockets, Soviet-era short-range projectiles.

The swarm of airborne weapons, it said, sought to overwhelm Israel’s vaunted air defense systems and pave a path for its targets: 11 Israeli military sites in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said all of Hezbollah’s drones were intercepted.

Israeli officials said the military pre-emptively struck Hezbollah targets in the early hours of Sunday to prevent a much wider attack, adding that it hit many rocket launchers in Lebanon. Hezbollah dismissed this.

“What happened was aggression, not preemptive action,” Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Sunday night, referring to the Israeli strikes that began around half an hour before Hezbollah’s attack.

Three Lebanese fighters were killed in those Israeli attacks, Hezbollah said.

The cross-border fire on Sunday morning marked a significant escalation after nearly 11 months of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. But it appears to have dampened fears of a wider war, for now.

In Israel, authorities soon lifted security restrictions in the country’s northern-most territory, known as the upper Galilee. In Lebanon, Hezbollah said it had concluded attacks on Israel for the day. Nasrallah declared the group’s retaliation for Shukr’s killing “meticulously” completed.

With both sides declaring victory, the region appears to once again have walked back from the brink of all-out war.

But while Hezbollah’s promised response appears to be largely out of the way, Israel must continue to wait for another threat to transpire: Iran’s vowed “revenge” for the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which it blamed on Israel.

The low-intensity conflict at the Lebanon-Israel border is set to resume. Netanyahu said on Sunday that “what happened today is not the end.” Nasrallah meanwhile struck a similar tone, reinforcing a widely held view that the fighting on the border is a war of attrition, where each side aims to wear down the other.

A region on a knife’s edge

After the attacks in Beirut and Tehran at the end of last month, Western and Israeli intelligence officials, diplomats and analysts scrambled to figure out what the retaliations promised by Iran and its most powerful non-state partner might look like.

It sparked shuttle diplomacy with the United States, the United Kingdom and France urging Hezbollah and Iran to exercise restraint. This appeared to expedite another round of talks over a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, in a bid to ward off another escalation by the Iran-led axis, which has repeatedly conditioned stopping its attacks on Israel and its allies on an end to the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

The talks to end the war continue to move at a glacial pace, despite intense diplomatic efforts by mediators including the US, Egypt and Qatar. High-level talks in Cairo ended on Sunday, giving way to the resumption of lower-level technical negotiations. But even as the US expresses optimism, with one official describing the weekend’s talks as “constructive,” there are no signs of progress on the major sticking points.

This raises the stakes for a potential showdown between Iran and Israel. But Tehran may be inclined to pay lip service to the talks. While it has vowed to respond to Israel, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly said that it wants to avoid action that could adversely impact the negotiations. And the latest escalation has shown that neither Iran nor its allied non-state fighting groups in the region can stomach the prospect of a wider war.

Hezbollah had repeatedly vowed to retaliate to any Israeli strike in Beirut with an attack on major urban centers in Israel. Yet, whether by design or due to Israel’s claimed pre-emptive strikes, it fell short of that threat. Most of the areas it targeted on Sunday were within the border area that has been the site of the hostilities since October and the short-range Soviet-era rockets it used have been a mainstay of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli forces for decades.

The risk of an all-out conflict appears to be significantly lower in the aftermath of Sunday’s crossfire. Yet Iran’s open-ended threat will continue to contribute to the war of nerves that has defined much of the low-grade conflict between the Tehran-led axis and Israel. The region will remain on a knife’s edge for as long as the war in Gaza goes on, at the mercy of the next miscalculation, no matter how low the warring parties’ appetite for conflict might be.

This article has been updated.

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