Nasrallah killing risks dragging the US into a war it says it tried to avert
US diplomats in Israel found their mobile phones buzzing with alerts on Friday night warning about a major escalation in Lebanon.
The alerts came as a result of Israel's assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut's densely packed southern suburbs of Dahiyeh.
On Saturday, Hezbollah, a group which was born out of Israel's occupation of south Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, confirmed that its long-serving leader of 32 years had been killed.
The attack caught three US officials in the region and Washington DC who spoke to MEE by suprise, raising the spectre that Israel, the US's closest Middle East ally, had brought Washington to the brink of a new regional war.
For months, the Biden administration had said it was focused on achieving a ceasefire in Gaza that it hoped would keep a lid on regional tensions. Now, US diplomats say, the killing of Nasrallah has shifted all attention onto Lebanon, and Iran's so-called "Axis of Resistence".
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A US diplomat in the region briefed by Israeli officials told Middle East Eye that Israel was "on the verge of launching a ground invasion of Lebanon".
"They are saying that a ground invasion is necessary not just to return Israelis to the north, but to stop Tel Aviv from being struck," the diplomat added.
Having failed at diplomacy to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, the White House now finds the ground shifting beneath its feet.
On the one hand, Israel's assassination of Nasrallah has further underscored the weakness of the Axis of Resistance, which US officials feared would go to all-out war with Israel if it attacked Beirut.
Washington surrendered its leverage
Even after Israel's invasion of Gaza jolted the US's plan to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the White House tried to keep the war on Gaza contained within the besieged enclave's borders.
Critics of the White House say it has repeatedly failed to back up its rhetoric with actions. They say Washington surrendered its leverage by refusing to withhold arms to Israel in order to force it to the negotiating table.
Iran's armed allies, including Yemen's Houthis and Hezbollah, took the unprecedented step to attack Israel directly in what they said was solidarity with besieged Palestinians in Gaza where more than 11 months of war has killed at least 41,000 people.
Their decision was a remarkable step for a collection of armed actors whose primary goal US officials and analysts long said was to defend Iran from attack, not the Palestinians.
Serving as a model for other Iranian-backed groups across the Middle East, Hezbollah had proven itself as the most powerful member of the axis.
'The threshold for an all out war has been crossed'
- Firas Maksad, Middle East Institute
Hezbollah like other Axis of Resistance groups is united to the Islamic Republic by shared animosity towards the US and Israel. However, these groups also have their own local ambitions.
For months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had rejected outright the US's belief that the best way to deal with the axis and end regional tensions was a ceasefire in Gaza.
Netanyahu faced pressure from his right-wing allies in Israel to continue the war. But Netanyahu has also made a strategic bet that it is in Israel's interest not to link its war on Gaza to other fights with the Axis of Resistance. Some in Israel's senior leadership, including Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, pressed for an offensive on Hezbollah regardless of the fate of talks in Gaza.
Netanyahu ordered the killing of Hamas' politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, targeted senior Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon, bombed the Houthis in Yemen, and detonated thousands of explosive devices used by Hezbollah across Lebanon.
However, the killing of Nasrallah, the unrivalled star of Iran's axis of resistance, is a crescendo of that campaign.
Israel showed no hesitation
Some hawks in the US supported this campaign, but the Biden administration was apparently never fully onboard with its ally.
On Friday, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin tried to distance the US from the attack.
"We had no advance warning. My call with Minister Gallant took place while the operation was actually already underway," he said.
If Austin's comments are true, it's an embarrassing admission, but not out of step. In April, when Israel launched drones at Iran, Israel apparently failed to notify its closest ally.
The fact that Nasrallah was killed just as Biden counts down the days until he leaves office is also ironic to say the least.
Biden had entered the White House vowing to de-escalate tensions with the Islamic Republic and revive a failed 2015 nuclear deal. Even as he pushed for normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, he moved to end wars in Yemen and relax santions enforcement on Iran.
One of his administration's few diplomatic successes in the Middle East was brokering a 2022 maritime deal between Israel and Lebanon that required Nasrallah's de-facto consent.
When the Biden administration decided to engage in combat against Iran's armed allies, such as the Houthis, diplomats claim the White House did so grudgingly.
Israel, backed by US arms, however, showed no such hesitation.
'Threshold for all-out war crossed'
Nasrallah's killing also likely spells a death knell for the Biden administration's old diplomacy towards Lebanon.
For months, Biden's envoy, Amos Hochstein, lobbied Hezbollah and Israel to cease their border fighting and implement an almost 20-year old UN security council resolution that ended the 2006 war between them.
On Friday, Blinken reaffirmed that was the US's framework.
"Going back to October 6 in terms of the border between Lebanon and Israel is not sufficient," the US' top diplomat said, adding that Washington wanted to implement UN Security Council resolution 1701, which diplomats say both Hezbollah and Israel have violated.
Frank Lowenstein, a former special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration, told MEE that the Biden administration probably hopes that Israel's bombing on Hezbollah will get the group to delink itself from Hamas in Gaza.
"When it became clear that there was not going to be a ceasefire in Gaza or Lebanon, the best the Biden administration could hope for was for Israel to destroy as much of Hezbollah’s military capability as possible from air," Lowenstein said.
US officials had hope that if Israel took out enough of Hezbollah's missile capabilities it would reduce the risk of a potential ground invasion igniting a regional war, analysts and former officials told MEE.
"A bombing campaign that destroys much of Hezbollah’s missile capabilities is a good thing for Israel and the US," Lowenstein said. "A ground operation is not."
Even before talks on 1701 started, Hezbollah chaffed at the demand to hold fire without a ceasefire in Gaza. Hochstein warned the group that the US would not constrain Israel if it decided to attack in full-force, as MEE previously revealed.
However, some experts said that Hochstein's diplomacy failed because it wasn’t backed up by force.
"Nasrallah climbed a very high ladder connecting the Gaza and Lebanon fronts," Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, told MEE, referring to the slain Hezbollah chief.
"But I don't think he expected this [the scale of Israeli attacks on Lebanon]."
Nasrallah's killing also appears to be Netanayhu's final repudiation of the Biden administration's failed efforts to reduce regional tensions via a Gaza ceasefire, as opposed to war against the Axis of Resistance.
"This is an assassination that exceeds Lebanon's border," Firas Maksad, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute said.
"The hinge of history has turned. The unprecedented nature of the attack; the scale and scope, answers the question many of us have been watching for... that the threshold for an all-out war has been crossed."
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