The New Yorker: Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War?
A long but intense and informative report on the fighting status of allies Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/29/will-hezbollah-and-israel-go-to-war?_sp=7b1494e7-51db-4f1c-82df-a8d62dd54575.1722681713355
non paywall https://archive.ph/Jqifv
"...Hezbollah has been in conflict with Israel since the group was founded, in the nineteen-eighties, but in the past year the fighting has grown dangerously intense. On October 7th, Hamas militants surged across Israel’s southwestern border and killed more than eleven hundred people. The next day, Hezbollah fired into Israel from the north, launching a volley of rockets that provoked a retaliatory strike. Since then, the shelling and bombing by each side have intensified, stoking fears of an all-out war that would devastate the region...
...Paul told me that Qaouzah, like the rest of Lebanon, was held hostage by the possibility of increased conflict. “Hezbollah is going to drag us into a war,” he said. The group’s leaders have said that they will continue their attacks until Israel halts its operations in Gaza—a condition that Israel has no intention of granting. In the meantime, the cross-border assaults grow more threatening. An open war would be devastating. Hezbollah, a far more formidable and better-armed group than Hamas, is believed to possess at least a hundred and fifty thousand missiles and rockets, many of them capable of hitting targets across Israel. In the inevitable counterstrikes, Lebanon, which has uneasily accommodated Hezbollah since the nineteen-eighties, would likely be destroyed...
Two decades ago, a Western official pulled up in front of a Hezbollah office in southern Beirut and sent his bodyguards away. “My security detail went crazy,” the official told me. Leaving his cell phone behind, he was ushered by Hezbollah members into a car whose windows had been blacked out. After several blocks, the car stopped, and the official was led to another vehicle. He was driven for a while and then switched again—and again. Finally, the car began descending, into what he guessed was an underground parking garage. “We went very far down,” he said. The official was led from the car to an elevator, which went up a couple of floors. The doors opened to reveal Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah. “There he was, just standing there, waiting for me,” the official said...
Nasrallah has spent much of the past eighteen years in fortified bunkers, surrounded by guards. He has been largely in hiding since the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006—a thirty-four-day spasm of violence that left Lebanon in ruins. During the fighting, Israeli jets flattened most of Dahiya, the part of southern Beirut where Hezbollah has its headquarters. They also targeted Nasrallah twice, missing both times. “The third time, we won’t miss,” an Israeli official told me afterward...."
