Israel and Hezbollah Inch Closer to War

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. Our colleague Amy Mackinnon is currently reporting on the ground from Israel, so we’ve asked her to guest star in SitRep this week to share her insights.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The growing risks of an Israel-Hezbollah war, Russia tries to redraw the map of the Baltic Sea, the fallout from the death of Iran’s president, and more.

Hezbollah Threat Looms Over Northern Israel

KFAR VRADIM, Israel—Standing on a hilltop in the small town of Kfar Vradim in Israel’s western Galilee region, Sarit Zehavi, a former Israeli military intelligence analyst, gestures across the verdant valley on the horizon some nine kilometers to the north.

Just beyond the clusters of villages that dot the mountainous region—home to Jews, Arabs, Christians, and Druze—lies Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. On the other side lies one of Israel’s most powerful foes: Hezbollah, the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world. Financed, equipped, and trained by Iran, the group has a vast arsenal of rockets and missiles, including anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles, as well as advanced cyber-capabilities.

Since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas’s ally Hezbollah has launched hundreds of mortar, missile, and rocket attacks into Israel in near-daily clashes with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel responded with nearly 4,000 strikes of its own, mostly with artillery and missiles, between October 2023 and March of this year, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. It is an often overlooked front that many fear still has potential to spiral into a catastrophic new war that could quickly engulf the region.

“I truly don’t know where this is heading, and your bet is as good as mine,” said Zehavi, who is now president of the Alma Research and Education Center, a think tank based in the region.

Tensions ramping up. Hezbollah’s attacks have become increasingly sophisticated in recent weeks and are reaching deeper into Israel.

Last week, the group struck two IDF surveillance balloons. One attack, which struck near Golani Junction some 21 miles south of the Lebanese border, resulted in a direct hit on the large IDF observation balloon, Sky Dew, with Soviet S-5 rockets launched from an unmanned drone, thought to be an Iranian-made Ababil T. The attack is believed to be the first time the group has succeeded in carrying out an air-to-surface strike from within Israeli airspace since Oct. 8, 2023, according to an analysis by the Alma Center, which noted that “although this is not a very advanced capability at this stage, it does constitute a significant leap forward for Hezbollah.”

A second reconnaissance balloon was struck closer to the border by an Iranian-made Almas antitank missile. While Israel has a formidable, multilayered air defense system capable of intercepting both short- and long-range missiles, it has no way of defending against attacks from precision antitank missiles, which have been used in an “unprecedented” manner by Hezbollah to target civilian and military sites along the border. “We don’t have an answer to the antitanks,” Zehavi said.

New tech on the not-quite-battlefield. Communities along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon have been battered with strikes from Russian Kornet antitank guided missiles, designed to be used against heavy battle tanks, as well as the Almas, the designs of which are based on a reverse-engineering of Israeli technology, Zehavi said.

Hezbollah’s use of the system is new, she said. “We’re familiar with the technology, but not with the fact that it’s in the hands of Hezbollah,” she said.

Approximately 60,000 people were evacuated from communities along the northern border with Lebanon in the days and weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, and they remain scattered across the country, staying with family and in hotels and repurposed holiday resorts.

The clashes have also driven about 90,000 people in southern Lebanon from their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration. The fighting along the border has killed more than 250 Hezbollah fighters and about 75 civilians, Reuters reported earlier this month.

“Something we didn’t fathom.” Itai Peres, an evacuee from Kibbutz Dafna, located just over a kilometer away from the Lebanese border, said that before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, he had all but forgotten how close the border was to their town. Following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War (also called the Second Lebanon War), the area was relatively quiet, with Hezbollah mounting just a few dozen attacks in the 17 years since. “The general perception was that Hezbollah was deterred,” Zehavi said.

In the first days of the war, Peres, a third-generation resident of the kibbutz, was reluctant to leave with his wife and three daughters.

“We’ve been through wars, we’ve been through the Second Lebanon War, and basically we thought to ourselves, ‘If they’re going to bomb, we know what they’re sending.’ We thought we knew,” he said.

But the Hamas attacks, which saw the Gaza-based group launch an unprecedented ground incursion into Israel, brought with it the new and terrifying prospect of a similar ground invasion by Hezbollah. “What we have now that we didn’t have in the past is the threat of what we had in the south. Basically a raid,” he said. “This is something we didn’t fathom.”

—Amy Mackinnon

Let’s Get Personnel

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has asked King Charles III to dissolve Parliament to prepare for an election in July. Sunak’s poll ratings have sunk to record lows while the Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer, are favorites in the campaign to end the Conservatives’ 14-year hold on power.

Nelson Cunningham has joined the State Department as a senior advisor to the undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment. He will head up the agency’s environmental engagement with India.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Man down. The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Sunday in a helicopter crash left the Islamic Republic reeling as one of the most likely successors to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was suddenly gone. Raisi’s death in the crash, which also killed Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as well as other top officials and crew members, comes just weeks after Iran launched a massive drone and ballistic missile strike against Israel. Iran now has a little over a month until new elections that experts anticipate will only further solidify Tehran’s hard-line direction toward the United States, Israel, and other powers in the Middle East.

Redrawing the map. A draft Russian government decree that proposed to alter the borders of the Baltic Sea back to the Soviet era is raising hackles in NATO. The proposal, which was posted on the Russian government’s website and then later deleted, claimed territory in the Gulf of Finland, islands near the Finnish coast, and an area near the Kaliningrad Peninsula that is bordered by Poland and Lithuania.

To veteran security watchers on the Western side of the NATO border, this reeks of a deliberate and carefully calculated provocation, a vintage case of Russian hybrid warfare. “If this turns out to be another trial balloon, it would hardly be a surprise,” said Henri Vanhanen, a Finnish security analyst. “What happens next depends on Russia, but we are talking about the borders of two NATO members and hence this would need to be addressed by the alliance.”

Tax man. The United States government has spent $10.9 million that has benefited Taliban-controlled organizations since Afghanistan fell to the militant group in August 2021, according to a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a U.S. watchdog agency overseeing reconstruction efforts and monitoring for waste, fraud, and abuse during the 20-year war.

And that’s probably just a fraction of the real number, according to SIGAR, because U.N. agencies getting U.S. funding did not collect data on payouts from their subcontractors.

Another eyebrow-raising conclusion from the report: SIGAR found that “some U.S. officials believe that no payments made to Taliban-controlled governing institutions in Afghanistan need to be reported on the basis that these payments do not qualify as taxes or other payments to a ‘host government.’ This position is especially concerning because it appears to justify conducting less oversight.”

Snapshot

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators hold up painted hands as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives to testify for a Senate appropriations subcommittee on state, foreign operations, and related programs hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on May 21. Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, May 23: U.S. President Joe Biden meets Kenyan President William Ruto at the White House.

Friday, May 24: G-7 finance ministers and central bank governors are meeting in Stresa, Italy, through Saturday, where U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is expected to push allies to provide assistance to Ukraine using interest from frozen Russian financial assets.

Sunday, May 26: Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda faces a runoff election in his bid for a second term against Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, a rematch of the 2019 elections.

French President Emmanuel Macron begins a three-day state visit to Germany.

Monday, May 27: The World Health Organization’s World Health Assembly, the organization’s decision-making body, holds its annual multiday meeting in Geneva.

Wednesday, May 29: South Africa holds general elections. Madagascar holds parliamentary elections.

Quote of the Week

“And he goes, ‘That f—er would knife me in the stomach if he had the chance.’”

—Gordon Sondland, who served as former U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, recounting what Trump told him about what he really thought of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in the newest FP interview.

This Week’s Most Read

• What Raisi’s Death Means for Iran’s Future by Jack Detsch
• U.S. Intelligence Is Facing a Crisis of Legitimacy by David V. Gioe, Michael S. Goodman, and Michael V. Hayden
• The U.S. Navy Can’t Build Ships by Gil Barndollar and Matthew C. Mai

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Memelord-in-chief. The Biden campaign is hiring a chief meme officer. OK, that’s not the official job title, but it is looking to bring on someone who “will initiate and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages.”