Israel’s Necessary Preemptive Strike against Iran and Hezbollah

M ost informed analysts presume a major war pitting Israel against jihadist Iran and its Hezbollah militia is inevitable. I prefer to frame it this way: The war is on and has been for some time; the real questions are how intense it is and how intense it may become at any given time.

Regardless of which is the more accurate assessment, it can’t be gainsaid that the war is now in a new, more intense phase, and could easily become much worse.

As our Haley Strack reported Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces unleashed a preemptive attack on Saturday as Hezbollah was on the verge of firing what could have been up to thousands of missiles and drones not only at northern Israel (just over the Lebanese border, from which Hezbollah operates) but also at both strategic and civilian targets in central Israel, including Tel Aviv. The Long War Journal (LWJ), an invaluable project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reports that the IDF hit 270 targets.

I recently detailed intelligence estimates that Hezbollah has an arsenal of up to 150,000 Iranian-supplied missiles (many precision-guided) and about 50,000 fighters, many of them battle-hardened by years of combat in Syria and intermittent skirmishes with Israel since the end of a major flare-up in 2006.

Israel’s Iron Dome is a tremendous defensive shield, but it cannot block everything. If Hezbollah were to succeed in launching thousands of missiles, some — perhaps many — would get through. That could do tremendous damage to Israel, a country of fewer than 10 million people that is roughly the size of New Jersey and only about nine miles wide at its narrowest.

It is also worth reiterating — because American and other Western governments will not come to grips with the fundamentals of the conflict — that this is an existential war for Israel, whose sharia-supremacist foes, both Shiite and Sunni, harbor deep-seated antisemitism and regard Israel’s existence as an affront to Islam. Israel must fight and defeat its enemies. There will be no armistice, only temporary pauses — which Western progressives delusionally see as “the path to peace” and a “two-state solution” that none of the combatants supports, while sharia supremacists see as scripturally approved opportunities to revive and rearm for the next rounds of attacks.

Consequently, Israel cannot wait to be attacked if its intelligence services detect imminent Hezbollah strikes. That is what happened in the last few days. To be clear, what Israel did was conduct a preemptive attack to thwart a certain Hezbollah onslaught that would have been a significant intensification of hostilities. Israel did not launch a preemptive war.

To the contrary, in collaboration with Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah began its most recent round of cross-border strikes from Lebanon on October 8 — within 24 hours of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel. The strikes have since continued with varying levels of ferocity.

Recently, there has been a notable surge. It was Hezbollah’s rocket strike at a soccer field in a Druze village in the Golan Heights on July 27 that was the proximate cause of Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr on July 31 (nearly simultaneous with Israel’s killing of Hamas emir Ismail Haniyeh in Iran). Shukr had coordinated dozens of Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel, which over 60,000 Israelis have had to evacuate. Many of those Israelis have now been out of their homes (or what’s left of them) for months.

In the lead-up to Israel’s operation this weekend, Hezbollah had carried out significant strikes on August 11, 15, and 21. The LWJ elaborates: “More than 420 Hezbollah members have been killed, and the group has launched more than 7,500 rockets and 200 drones at Israel over 10 months of attacks.”

Meanwhile, Iran and Hezbollah have both threatened more significant strikes, which would take their war of aggression into the heart of Israel — even as Israel continues fighting Hamas in Gaza while keeping a wary eye on Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), where Iran is stoking more of its jihadist proxies.

Those significant strikes were about to happen. That is why Israel acted decisively, reminding its enemies — as it did by taking out Haniyeh in Tehran while the Iranian regime marked the installation of a new president — that it has extraordinarily good intelligence about their planning, the capacity to hit them hard, and the will to do so notwithstanding Biden-administration calls for restraint and “de-escalation.” (To be fair, these have been coupled with the administration’s deployment of significant American naval forces in the region, which have discouraged Iran and its proxies from going too far — but not stopped them.)

In the above-linked column after Hezbollah’s August 11 firing of about 30 rockets into northern Israel, I opined that Iran was trying to calibrate its attacks to damage Israel without igniting a wider, more intense regional war. I still believe that’s the case.

Although it has suffered setbacks in recent weeks, Tehran is winning by going it slow: Israel is being pounded on multiple fronts; its territory is effectively contracting, owing to the onslaughts of Hezbollah and Hamas; there are cracks in the post–October 7 unity of Israel’s populace, as tens of thousands of citizens (particularly from the north) seethe over their continued displacement as a new school year begins; and the Biden administration is pressuring Israel to accept a cease-fire in Gaza (a) before its war aims — the eradication of Hamas and return of the hostages — have been achieved, and (b) on terms that are unacceptable, such as acceding to Egyptian demands that Israel withdraw forces from the Philadelphi corridor (the border area between Egypt and the Gaza Strip), through which Egyptian jihadists (with, at best, the willful blindness of Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s regime in Cairo) ship weapons and other aid to Palestinian jihadists, led by Hamas.

Because of Israel’s preemptive action this weekend, Hezbollah was able to fire only about 230 rockets and launch about 20 drones, most of which were intercepted and none of which caused material harm. Hezbollah claims it fired 320 rockets — an exaggeration, but one that refrains from acknowledging the ambitious scale of its planned attack, which the IDF thwarted.

Again, the question remains: For now, will Iran be content to let stand Hezbollah’s version of events, which brays about its aggression while ignoring its ineffectiveness and Israel’s penetration of its war-planning? Or is this, as Hezbollah claims, just “phase one” of a stepped-up siege against Israel?

My hypothesis, for what it’s worth, is that it’s a little bit of both: The siege will continue without dramatic intensification because Iran is content with the status quo in which it is winning, and wants to avoid a wider, more intense war that it would lose.