Now Israel is fighting the war it planned for—alongside the one it refused to see coming and still hasn’t brought to an end.
Despite the thunder of the bombs in Lebanon; despite the stunning assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah; despite the suddenly renewed image of omniscient Israeli intelligence and a boost in domestic popularity for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the war in Gaza has not ended. Hamas still holds 101 Israeli hostages, dead or barely alive. Gaza is devastated—nine out of 10 of its people displaced, by one estimate. Netanyahu’s government still has no announced plan for who will rule Gaza on the day after the fighting ends, or for how it will end. Fighting the war that you prepared for is not a solution for the war you refused to see coming.
After Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, which was widely regarded as a debacle, Israel stepped up its espionage efforts with both human and electronic sources. According to a Financial Times report, Hezbollah expanded its numbers to fight on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the Syrian civil war and checked its recruits less carefully. That allowed Israel to plant spies and recruit Hezbollah members as sources. Unit 8200 of Israeli military intelligence, responsible for electronic spying, reportedly processed information from hacked cellphones, Lebanese security cameras, and home electronics. That long-running effort made Hezbollah stunningly vulnerable.
Consider the pager explosions on September 17, which signaled the sudden escalation between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli intelligence agencies apparently not only knew that their Lebanese Shiite enemy intended to buy thousands of the small low-tech devices for its operatives; they knew early enough to create a Hungarian shell company, which acquired a license to make Taiwanese pagers. They had enough advance notice to either booby-trap the gadgets or manufacture them from scratch. And they presumably knew exactly which Hezbollah agent would be shopping for them, likely under an assumed identity.
So Israel was ready to fight in Lebanon. Did it need to? Certainly it had a casus belli: Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah has steadily fired rockets and drones into northern Israel in support of Hamas. This was not full-scale war—but an estimated 60,000 Israelis from the area closest to the border are displaced elsewhere in the country.
The obvious way to restore quiet in the north might have been for Netanyahu’s government to reach a cease-fire in Gaza. Hezbollah’s stated reason for shooting would then vanish. Whether the group would have stood down isn’t certain—but Netanyahu never tested the possibility, and in fact seemed intent on avoiding it.
After the latest escalation, quiet in the south will probably not be enough to persuade Hezbollah to accept a truce. Now this is its own war, not Hamas’s. And as shattered as the Shiite organization is at the moment, an extended Israeli ground invasion could help it. Hezbollah was born as a resistance movement opposing Israel’s conquest of southern Lebanon in 1982. A new occupation risks restoring its popularity and reinvigorating it.
As for the panegyrics to Israel’s intelligence abilities, it’s worth noting that five days before the pager attack, the commander of Unit 8200 resigned. “On October 7 at 6:29 a.m. I did not fulfill my mission,” Brigadier General Yossi Sariel wrote, referring to the moment when the Hamas invasion of Israel began last year. Major General Aharon Haliva, the commander of military intelligence, had resigned several months earlier, likewise admitting failure. Israeli media investigations over the past year suggest that the army made risky changes in how it gathered information on Hamas in Gaza and ignored the evidence it had of an impending attack.
Israel’s recent successes in Lebanon don’t erase last October’s fiasco. They underline it. Intelligence resources apparently weren’t devoted on the same scale to Gaza. Generals and political leaders, it seems, assumed that the danger was from Iran’s most devoted proxy, in Lebanon. The fact that since October 7, Israeli officers have repeatedly expressed shock at the extent of the tunnel network in Gaza suggests that Israel possessed too little intelligence about Hamas’s military assets. Ultimately, the military error complemented the right-wing government’s political view that the Palestinian issue could be postponed indefinitely because the Palestinians were divided and Hamas was focused on governing Gaza, rather than on another round of fighting with Israel.
The intensity of the war in Gaza has ebbed somewhat, but the fighting continues. Israel says it has “dismantled” 22 of 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza, a claim that outside experts dispute. The organization is still able to wage guerrilla attacks—meaning that if the Israeli army stays in Gaza, it will face the kind of long conflict that wore it down in southern Lebanon in the 1980s and ’90s. Netanyahu has rejected even indirect Palestinian Authority control of Gaza. But without a stable government in the territory, few if any outside players will be likely to invest in desperately needed reconstruction.
And after the failure of negotiations, largely due to Netanyahu’s intransigence, the hostages remain in Gaza. Those still alive may not last much longer: The bodies of the six hostages recovered a month ago showed that they were starving even before their captors shot them. On Saturday night, the massive weekly protest in Tel Aviv to demand a hostage deal had to be canceled because of the risk of a Hezbollah missile attack. Symbolically, the new war overshadowed the old one. Yet even if Israel achieves some form of success in Lebanon, the catastrophe of Gaza will remain.