BEIRUT —
When Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s top military commander last month in a rare airstrike in Beirut, it marked the highest-level loss for the group since 2008 and the most provocative act to date in renewed cross-border clashes that now threaten to spark another full-blown war between Israel and Lebanon.
Fuad Shukr’s assassination was part of a decades-old policy by Israel to disrupt its adversaries’ capabilities through targeted killings. Hours after the strike on Shukr, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh died in a bombing in Tehran, an attack widely blamed on Israel.
Israel’s assassination campaign against Hezbollah intensified in the fall, after the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite paramilitary faction — which is also Lebanon’s most powerful political party — began firing thousands of rockets into northern Israel. Hezbollah said the offensive was in support of Hamas, which has been fighting a 10-month war with Israel following the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7 offensive that killed around 1,200 Israelis and captured about 250 hostages.
In response to Oct. 7, Israel invaded Gaza, killing nearly 40,000 Palestinians, Gaza authorities say, a figure that does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The war has also triggered a humanitarian crisis.
To its north, however, Israel has relied on its well-honed strategy of airstrikes and assassinations, killing more than 400 Hezbollah fighters and some two dozen Hezbollah commanders, including two senior division commanders serving under Shukr as well as high-ranking members of the Radwan Force, Hezbollah’s special forces contingent.
Israel says those losses have, one by one, degraded Hezbollah’s leadership ranks and diminished its fighting capability at a time when the two enemies may soon face each other in direct conflict. Israeli officials also say that those killed had “blood on their hands.”
The U.S. had a $5-million bounty on Shukr as the alleged architect of the 1983 Marine barracks suicide bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel. Israel said he was responsible for a rocket attack last month that killed 12 children in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a claim Hezbollah denied.
“Tonight, we have shown that the blood of our people has a price, and that there is no place out of reach for our forces to this end,” wrote Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a post on the social media platform X after the strike on Shukr.
Yet the impact of Israel’s strategy remains in question. In the short term, it may yield some results, analysts say, but a longer-term strategic victory is less certain.
That’s especially true when it comes to Hezbollah, said Hilal Khashan, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. Losses in its ranks “hurt Hezbollah, but they don’t really change anything in terms of the balance of power between it and Israel,” he said.
The group can backfill any void from its fighting force, thought to number roughly 100,000. It can also rely on its patron Iran,