For almost a year, Israel and Hezbollah have been involved in an intense war of attrition which the Israeli government has decided to end by launching massive bombings and announcing a possible new ground invasion of Lebanon.
In this war of attrition and action-reaction, both had avoided a large-scale conflict. The Shiite group Hezbollah began shooting on October 8 in response to the offensive in Gaza (which has already left hundreds of Palestinian dead on the first day) and Israel used the argument of “self-defense”. A data analysis carried out by elDiario.es confirms that, until the recent escalation of the conflict, Israel’s attacks in Lebanon increased those carried out by militias fivefold. Thus, 83% of cross-border incidents were committed by Israel.
Between October 8, 2023 – the date on which Hezbollah announced the launch of rockets “in solidarity” with the Palestinian people and as part of a plan “to liberate the occupied Lebanese territory in the Chebaa farms” – and the 16 September 2024 – the day before. After the beep blasts and the start of the new phase of the Israeli offensive on the northern front, there were a total of 9,950 incidents recorded by the organization Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an international NGO independent which collects data on conflicts and demonstrations around the world. Of these, 7,940 were carried out by the Israeli armed forces and 1,610 by Hezbollah.
During the same period, Hezbollah attacks killed 26 people, while Israeli attacks killed 711. The huge difference between the two figures has widened further during the last week of attacks on the bomb, which only caused around 500 deaths on the first day. . Since Israel launched a massive attack via Hezbollah members’ pagers last week, Lebanese authorities have recorded 1,540 deaths and 5,410 injuries in the Arab country.
The database does not include the attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in which 12 miners died. Israel accuses Hezbollah of carrying out the attack, but the group denies it.
The recorded incidents do not include those in which Israel intercepted Hezbollah rockets, which, according to the database, occurred 197 times between October 8 and September 16. Israel only intercepts rockets if they fall in populated areas where they endanger the population.
Additionally, the database does not quantify each rocket as an “event”, but rather events that refer to incidents occurring at a specific location and time and can group together multiple attacks with dozens of rocket launches or bomb attacks.
“De-escalation through escalation”
“We must continue to attack Hezbollah. We have been waiting for this opportunity for years,” Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said Thursday. Netanyahu made a similar speech when he landed in New York for his speech to the UN General Assembly: “Israel will continue to attack Hezbollah until we achieve all of our objectives. »
Israel has defined this new phase as a preventive offensive. “We are not waiting for the threat to come, we are anticipating it,” Netanyahu said. Israeli government sources assured Axios last week that they were not seeking open war, but that the offensive was an attempt at “de-escalation through escalation,” that is, to subdue Hezbollah through strength.
Since October 8, Israel has been considering the possibility of launching a preventive war in Lebanon. Shortly after Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, warplanes were ready to receive orders to bomb Lebanon. On October 11 at 6:30 a.m., Israeli authorities informed the White House that they were considering preemptive strikes and seeking its support, but Washington managed to stop the operation, according to information from the think tank American, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“From 2006 to October 7, 2023, for 17 years, no major incident occurred on the border between Lebanon and Israel and Hezbollah was there,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou said this week. Habib, during a meeting organized by the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. think tank Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. In the year leading up to the October 7 Hamas attacks, ACLED recorded only 15 incidents, 13 of them carried out by Israel with no fatalities and two initiated by Hezbollah with one fatality.
CSIS analysts agree with the minister. “Since 2006, an uncomfortable deterrence has prevailed. Israel has at times attacked Hezbollah fighters and weapons supply convoys, and there have been intermittent rocket, drone and other strikes on both sides of the border. For the most part, however, the border was the calmest it had been in decades, with both sides keen to avoid another all-out war. On October 7, the situation changed dramatically, making it much more volatile.
“There are a lot of people in establishment “Israel’s defense team believes it has been too long since Israel delivered its last major blow to Hezbollah,” says Jon B. Alterman, director of CSIS’s Middle East program. “They believe that Israel’s deterrence has diminished because its response to Hezbollah rockets has been too subdued since October 7.”
“This government [de Israel] can only survive through wars […] Every time we had an escalation, it was an Israeli escalation,” the Lebanese foreign minister said, while acknowledging that Hezbollah began launching rockets on October 8.
