By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

On September 27, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, by dropping between 60 to 80 bunker-buster bombs on a densely populated neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs. The strike killed several other Hezbollah leaders, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general, and at least 33 civilians. It injured 195 more.

This attack, others that followed, and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon represent the ramping-up of a yearlong escalation against Hezbollah’s leadership. In that timeframe, Israel’s military has killed hundreds of militants and thousands of civilians. Among the former are at least two dozen military commanders and high-ranking officials, including Nasrallah’s anticipated successor, Hashem Safieddine. On October 8, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the campaign had succeeded. “We took out thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself, and Nasrallah’s replacement, and the replacement of his replacement,” he said.

According to his logic—and that of other Israeli government officials—these assassinations will help permanently destroy Hezbollah. But the reality is that they are unlikely to work. Hezbollah is a 40-year-old organization with a large social base, a political party represented in Lebanon’s parliament and cabinet, and Iranian state backing. It is adaptable and resilient. Israel might succeed at temporarily fragmenting the group, but Hezbollah will likely reconsolidate. Newly elevated commanders will likely retaliate against Israel to prove their credentials and demonstrate the organization’s relevance.

Even if Israel’s assassination campaign does permanently weaken Hezbollah, another group will probably rise to fill the void. Throughout history, when targeted killings have irreparably damaged armed organizations, others typically coalesce to take their place. That is in part because assassinations are a tactic, not a political solution. They do nothing to resolve the underlying issues that drive conflict. And whether by mistake or as collateral damage, targeted killings routinely kill and maim civilians while destroying infrastructure. They amplify popular grievances, drive militant recruitment, and disrupt negotiations. Targeted killings, in other words, prolong violence rather than end it.

 

Unintended Consequences

For more than 50 years, Israel has assassinated militant leaders in Lebanon using commando raids, car bombs, and airstrikes. These attacks have focused attention on what some scholars and military strategists call “leadership decapitation”: killing or capturing leaders of nonstate armed groups in hopes of degrading their capabilities and spurring organizational collapse.

Neither “targeted killing” nor “leadership decapitation” are formal terms in international law. Many experts argue that both are simply euphemisms for extrajudicial executions, which the laws of armed conflict proscribe. The tactics’ proponents, especially Israel and the United States, contend that they are a militarily effective and morally justifiable way to degrade and defeat organized armed groups. Such strikes, the reasoning goes, can take out individuals essential to an armed organization’s functioning while minimizing civilian harm. But even under U.S. and Israeli interpretations, targeted killings should respect the principle of proportionality, meaning that the operation’s military gain must justify resultant civilian casualties. “Take the usual case of a combatant or a terrorist sniper shooting at soldiers or civilians from his porch,” Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak wrote in a 2006 opinion. “Shooting at him is proportionate even if, as a result, an innocent civilian neighbor or passerby is harmed. That is not the case if the building is bombed from the air and scores of its residents and passersby are harmed.”

Under most interpretations of the laws of armed conflict, including that of the International Committee of the Red Cross, many of the people Israel kills have protected status. By those readings, people employed or volunteering for Hezbollah’s social services and political wings are considered noncombatants, unless they are directly participating in hostilities. But Israel and the United States have a far more permissive interpretation of what constitutes direct participation in hostilities. In an October 16 strike on a municipal building in the Lebanese city of Nabatieh’s municipal building, for example, Israel killed the elected mayor—who ran on a joint Hezbollah-Amal candidate list—and officials in the city’s emergency services’ crisis committee.

Even if Israel’s strikes only killed combatants, targeted killings have another problem: they backfire. Although research on the tactic has yielded a mass of apparently contradictory findings, thanks in part to different measures of success, it generally suggests that such attacks fail to achieve their long-term aims. They did not succeed, for example, during U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The first country provides a kind of case-in-point. According to Johns Hopkins professor Dipali Mukhopadhyay—a leading expert on the U.S. war in Afghanistan—the United States fell into a trap that is emblematic of targeted killing campaigns: it focused on revenge and short-term political gains rather than on establishing durable solutions.

A billboard with the image of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Nahariya, Israel, November 2024

Assassinations can Elevate more Radical or more Effective Leaders.

Proponents of targeted killings argue that attacks against individuals actively involved in the planning and execution of violence reduce an organization’s capacity and collapse morale. The Israeli government claims its current operations in Lebanon achieve exactly these goals. Yet Hezbollah has proved resilient in the face of them. That is in large part because it is heavily institutionalized and bureaucratized. Such groups have set procedures and succession plans for when their leaders are promoted, die, or otherwise leave their positions. Cell-like units are trained to operate independently, such that killing the group’s top leadership may not permanently affect its capacity.

In the immediate aftermath of a major assassination, groups certainly can experience communication breakdowns, confusion, grief, and paranoia. Yet even if a mid-level commander, military bigwig, or senior leader is killed, deputies wait in the wings and fighters can continue attacks. Since Nasrallah’s death, for example, Hezbollah has launched hundreds of rockets, missiles, and drones at Israeli military bases, major cities such as Haifa, and Netanyahu’s residence.

A group that has publicly lost key figures may be more determined to prove its capabilities and rebuild its strength. Hezbollah first shelled across the Lebanese-Israeli border following the funeral of Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi (1), whom the Israel Defense Forces assassinated in 1992. Musawi’s death pushed Hezbollah’s leaders to retaliate and afforded maximalists in the organization to deploy increasingly sophisticated operations against the IDF in occupied south Lebanon and escalate to international attacks. Israel’s military intelligence chief from 1991 to 1995, Uri Sagi, directly linked Musawi’s assassination to Hezbollah’s escalation, including the group’s bombing of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina in 1992 and 1994. Close to a decade after Musawi’s death, Hezbollah was only stronger and more capable. Years of bloody stalemate in south Lebanon led to Israel’s eventual withdrawal in 2000. The country continued to conduct targeted killings against Hezbollah in the years that followed, but the group’s influence only continued to grow. On July 12, 2006, it launched a cross-border raid and killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. The result was the 2006 July War.

Assassinations can also elevate more radical or more effective leaders. Musawi’s assassination led to the rise of the more charismatic Nasrallah. As secretary-general, Nasrallah—along with Hezbollah’s top military strategist Imad Mughniyeh—was widely credited with transforming the group from a local militia to a nonstate military more powerful than the Lebanese Armed Forces. Similarly, assassinations can invite in outside actors who provide financial assistance and technical support. When Israel killed Mughniyeh in 2008, Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers became more involved in Hezbollah’s day-to-day operations. Similarly, in Gaza, the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004 cleared the way for deeper Iranian involvement with the organization—a relationship Yassin had opposed.

 

Violence Begets Violence

Even when targeted killings successfully temporarily degrade organizations’ leadership structures, they can result in more violence. In groups that employ compartmentalization and cell structures, factions with independent interests and agendas can emerge. Rising leaders then use violence to compete for attention, resources, and status—a practice political scientists call “outbidding.” The result is that the targeted group’s attacks often become less predictable and more sensational.

This process has already played out in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel invaded with the goal of rooting out the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian armed factions, which had been firing rockets and launching military raids from south Lebanon into northern Israel. Israel killed or imprisoned Palestinian commanders, along with thousands of civilians, leaving Palestinian operational units leaderless and uncoordinated. As Israel occupied southern Lebanon up to the coastal city of Saida, local Palestinian militias untethered to traditional command-and-control structures emerged. Operating in loose cooperation with Lebanese insurgents, these militias wreaked havoc on Israeli forces and their collaborators.

Israel consequently withdrew in 1985 to the border zone, which it occupied until 2000. But Lebanon continues to live with the war’s legacy. One of the Palestinian leaders Israel targeted in an October strike on Ain al-Hilweh camp, in Saida, came to prominence in this 1980s power vacuum.

The aftermath of Israel’s 1982 invasion illustrates another stark fact: permanently weakening or even defeating an organization can give rise to new ones. The Palestinians’ defeat and Israel’s occupation provided Hezbollah with its raison d’être. In August 1982, 14,398 Palestinian guerrillas evacuated Beirut following a United States–brokered ceasefire. Palestinian political leaders’ exile to Damascus and Tunis left a void that Hezbollah came to fill.

 

Collective Punishment

One core justification of targeted killings is the claim that they minimize civilian deaths. Yet operations targeting individuals have produced devastation and extensive civilian casualties. The airstrike that killed Nasrallah leveled an entire block of one of Lebanon’s most densely populated neighborhoods. Israel’s October 10 attack targeting Wafiq Safa, Hezbollah’s liaison to Lebanon’s security agencies, collapsed an eight-story apartment building in central Beirut, killing 22 people and wounding 117 more. The Israeli government says that it often uses phone calls, text messages, and air-dropped leaflets to prompt the evacuation of targeted areas before attacking them. But in October, Amnesty International reported that if evacuation notices arrive, they are often unclear or provide civilians insufficient time to leave the area.

Even operations that military analysts laud for their technical sophistication have lacked the precision to avoid widespread harm to civilians. Many observers were astonished, for example, when in September, Israel simultaneously detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah. But these attacks killed and maimed scores of people who do not belong to the group. Former CIA director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called them “a form of terrorism.”

In many cases, civilians who want to flee simply cannot. People who are elderly, sick, or disabled may not be capable of flight. In a country in which nearly half the population lives in poverty, too many others do not have the financial means to evacuate.

Given the devastating consequences, civilians in Lebanon experience targeted attacks as collective punishment. For the Israeli government, that may be the point. It certainly hopes that hardship will turn civilians against Hezbollah. In October, Netanyahu threatened Lebanon with “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza” unless people rise up against the organization. If people blame Hezbollah for their country’s destruction, the logic goes, they will help Israel target the group’s members and dismantle its influence.

 

Israel’s Attacks will Strengthen the Convictions of Hezbollah’s Supporters.

But this shift is extremely unlikely to happen. In fact, if anything, the opposite will occur. Israel is a foreign power that has already invaded Lebanon three times and launched smaller but still devastating military operations. During the 1982 to 2000 occupation, it brutally policed south Lebanon’s population, incarcerated thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and stoked sectarian tensions by outsourcing violence to the predominantly Christian South Lebanon Army. Occupation, along with the repression and hardship that accompanied it, rallied new recruits to Hezbollah and other Lebanese armed political parties’ ranks.

Civilians’ experience of Israel’s strikes as indiscriminate and ubiquitous further influences their decision-making. These attacks will strengthen the convictions of Hezbollah’s civilian supporters. Some who were not previously fighters may become willing to join, deciding that access to arms, a salary, and information is the best path they have, especially when they may be killed randomly even while attempting to avoid the escalating hostilities. As they did between 1982 and 2000, greater segments of the Lebanese population may well mobilize against Israel.

All in all, the record on targeted killings suggests that Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah are unlikely to destroy it. Israel has been using the tactic against the group for decades. Rather than collapsing, Hezbollah has proved both resilient and adaptive. Attempts at leadership decapitation have produced more violence, organizational expansion, and increased Iranian influence.

No one knows this better than the Lebanese people themselves. Israel’s attacks “will entrench Hezbollah,” Rami Mortada, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, said in October, responding to Netanyahu’s threat to turn Lebanon into Gaza. “It will increase frustration among the population. And it will play to the benefit of what Hezbollah has been saying for 40 years—that, ‘you see, Israel only understands the language of force.’”

 

1) 1992 February - Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, is killed when Israeli helicopter gunships attack his motorcade on a road southeast of Sidon.

 

 

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