Transcript of The Slide Toward War in Lebanon

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From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Last week, after the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers in walkie-talkies across Lebanon, aimed at the militant group Hezbollah. The question was, what would happen next? Over the past five days, we've gotten an answer.

The strikes came in waves, one after another.

In a series of attacks across Lebanon, including in densely populated parts of its capital, Beirut, route. Those attacks sent the country into high alert.

Thousands of people in the south have been fleeing their homes.

And prompted panic among Lebanon's civilians.

Okay, there's a A lot of panic. People are making their way out of this area. A few minutes ago, there's been another airstrike. You can see the smoke.

As of Tuesday night, the death toll stood at more than 600, according to the Lebanon Health Ministry, with more than 27,000 people in shelters. Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard on the origins of the spiraling conflict between Israel and its most feared regional adversary. It's Wednesday, September 25th. Ben, over the last several days, it really feels like we've come closer to an all-out war between Israel and the Lebanese militia group, Hezbollah, than we've ever been. You have a long history reporting on this group and their conflict conflict with Israel. I wonder what you've been thinking as you've been watching things develop over the past few days.

I've been watching this conflict between Hezbollah and Israel for a long, long time, and I've never seen anything like what we've seen over the last week. We had pagers blow up in the hands of people across Lebanon. The next day, we had walkie-talkies blow up, also inflicting damage. Right after that, we had a very high-level assassination of a senior Hezbole military leader and some of his comrades in Beirut in an Israeli airstrike. Then we had more than a thousand airstrikes across Lebanon, particularly in places where Hezbollah has a lot of power. We're watching this happen, and then we see the death toll just going up and up and up. By Monday night, it was over 500 people. It included women and children. Very soon, we realized that this is actually the deadliest day in Lebanon for many, many decades.

This, of course, is very different than what we've seen over the past 11 months October seventh, which is that Hezbollah began to fire into Israel after October seventh in solidarity with its ally Hamas. This is taking things up to a very different and very new level.

Yeah. Very soon after the Gaza War started, Hezbollah jumped in and started firing on Israel. The idea was to try to bog Israel down on the northern border so that it couldn't focus entirely on Gaza. Both sides had this understanding that they would continue this battle. They would strike each other, but They would try to keep things in certain bounds. They try to keep it confined to the border area and not let this blow up into a much bigger war. For many, many months, that worked. They basically did manage to keep it confined. The question as we were watching this was always, what would it take for this to spiral out of control? In my trips to Lebanon, talking to Hezbollah people and talking to other people close to the movement, they tended to mention three things. They talked about high-level assassinations of Hezbollah leaders. They talked about strikes directly on Beirut and not just along the Southern border. They talked about the killing of large numbers of Lebanese civilians. All of a sudden last week, the Israelis carried out this massive escalation in this battle and very quickly checked all three of those boxes.

Why is that? What changed?

Well, there's a few reasons for this. One is that there's a lot of political pressure inside of Israel on the leadership. You have somewhere around 60,000 Israelis who have fled their homes in the north because they're worried about getting hit by missiles fired by Hezbollah. There's a lot of pressure on the political leadership to find a way for these people to return home. Then, as far as we can tell, the capabilities for some of the early attacks, specifically the Pajr explosions and Waki-Taki explosions, had basically been set in motion a while ago. We have reporting suggesting that Hezbollah had discovered this and the Israelis realized they needed to use this or they were going to lose it. Those two elements came together and we've had this astounding series of attacks on Hezbollah that have changed the entire shape of this conflict.

Right. There's been this barrage of rocket fire and bombings, including in Beirut. Everything we've seen so far has indicated that there are a lot of Lebanese civilians caught in the crossfire. What are the Israelis saying that they're doing here?

Well, before all of this started on Monday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put out a video that was addressed to the Lebanese, telling them Basically that Hezbollah has been using them as human shields, putting rockets near their homes, dragging them into this war, and that all of these rockets are a threat to Israel. Israel was going to come in and try to take out this military infrastructure, and he asks the Lebanese to basically get out of the way. Say, if you are anywhere close to anything that has to do with Hezbollah, you better leave.

Which is probably very little solace for those families who've actually been affected by this. I mean, after all, you don't necessarily know where a Hezbollah installation is. But why this move away from Gaza when Hamas is the one that attacked Israel on October seventh?

For a very long time, Israel has regarded Hezbollah as one of the largest threats on its border. Even before the Hamas attack last October, Israeli officials were much more worried about Hezbollah than they were worried about Hamas. And so this has been something that has been in the air for a very long time. And people in the Israeli security establishment have felt like we're eventually going to need to go and take care this Hezbollah problem and get them off of our border. And now it seems like they've at least taken very, very significant steps in that direction. And it's still unclear how far it's going to go. I mean, it's already gotten to be much, much bigger than it was. Now everybody is wondering, what's next? Is there going to be continuous air strikes trying to take out Hezbollah's infrastructure, military infrastructure? Or is it possible that the Israelis are going to launch a ground invasion?

Okay, so now that an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah is a real possibility, including, as you say, potentially even up to an invasion of Lebanon. I wonder, Ben, if you could explain the broader context for all of this. How did these two start fighting in the first place?

So as it turns out, the conflict actually dates back to a ground invasion of Lebanon.

They said they didn't want to take Beirut unless they had to, but they came.

In the 1980s, Israel invaded. They crossed the border in 1982 to try to get militants off of their border, and they stayed. They basically set up a military occupation of the south of the country.

The Israelis said they had one goal to root out once and for all, Palestinian bases across the border from their northern settlement.

And then to establish a- And the Shiaite-Lebanese who were a majority in the south, weren't very happy to have them there. And so a group formed that came to be known as Hezbollah. Hezbollah guerrillas launched two salvos across the border from Lebanon Retaliation, they say, for Israel's shelling of South Lebanon on Friday. Which was at the time an underground resistance force, trying to get these invaders off of Lebanon soil. And they did this with the help of Iran, which provided them with support and funding, and it worked, basically. From now on in Lebanon, May the 25th will be a holiday, the National Day of Resistance and Liberation, to celebrate the departure of the Israelis from the south. They became a very effective guerrilla force, attacking Israeli forces. And in 2000, the Israelis packed up and left. And for Hezbollah, this was a huge victory for them and something that was noticed across the rest of the region. And they didn't stop. They continued to expand following an ideology of the resistance, which in their terminology is this shared vision of these forces across the region coming together to ultimately destroy Israel. And this is very deeply rooted in religious ideology that they share with Iran, and it guides them forward.

I should mention that Israel, the United States, and other countries consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

At this point, Hezbollah has emerged as a clear antagonist to Israel. What's the next flashpoint in this fight between these two adversaries?

Hezbollah continues to develop its role in Lebanese politics, its military capabilities. In 2006, some of its fighters launched a cross-border raid on Israel. They killed a number of soldiers, and they captured two and bring them back to Lebanon. I'm calling to the people who kidnapped him. Send us a sign of life from my son. This sets off a gigantic, devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah.

A very bloody one, as I remember, as I covered it. Yes.

Israel had to respond to this absolutely unprovoked assault whose scale and depth was unprecedented in recent years. Israel pummels South Lebanon and lots of Lebanese infrastructure across the country in airstrikes, launches a ground invasion, tries to come back in. Since the beginning of the war, there have been virtually no supplies being brought into Lebanon. That means that Lebanon, to all intents and purposes, has been shut off from the outside world. This drags on for about 34 days. More than a thousand Lebanese are killed, about 150 people are killed in Israel. Hugely, hugely destructive war. The head of Hezbollah pledge to wage an open war against Israel. Hezbollah shows itself to be an incredibly capable guerrilla force. Forces in Side Lebanon fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli border towns and a warship. They have tunnels dug in South Lebanon. They have bunkers. They use a lot of the landscape. They basically wait for the Israelis to come into these towns and villages and then pop up out of nowhere, fire anti-tank missiles, lay embushes, and it's incredibly effective. Basically, they reach a point where neither side figures they can go much further, and it brings the war to a stalemate.

Even though Lebanon has been devastated by this war, Hezbollah walks out of it looking like heroes. Once again, instead of being this scrappy force that fought the occupation, now they're one of the few forces in the region that can say, We stood up against the Israeli military and stopped them from even coming in.

Yeah, I remember watching those Hezbollah fighters emerge from the trenches on the day that Israel withdrawn, and they were really walking with the confidence of victorious men. Despite the fact that there had been massive casualties on the Lebanon side, they really were acting as though they had Yes.

This has an effect inside of Lebanon and in the broader region. Inside of Lebanon, their military forces get stronger and more effective, and they start to evolve into what a lot of people have called the state within a state. They have their own TV station where they broadcast the news, basically, of how they see the world. They start providing widespread social services, mainly to their poor people in their base community. They begin to play an even stronger role in Albanese politics, in parliamentary votes and government formation and things like that. They just start becoming a bigger part of the mix. Lebanon has an incredibly weak central state. This is a country that suffered a terrible, terrible 15-year civil war that it basically never recovered from. So it does have an army, but the army is not incredibly powerful. Hezbollah is just basically not subject to anybody's control. They never have to ask permission from anybody to do what they want to do. So they have members in parliament, and they usually have a handful of people in the cabinet, but that's not what they're really interested in. What they're really interested in is their broader military project, and they basically draw a very clear line around their military activities, and they will not let anyone else get involved or tell them what to do or not to do.

Okay, so that's on the domestic front. But you mentioned that the 2006 war and its outcome really had an effect on the broader region as well. So what was that?

So has Asballah's performance in the 2006 war really puts them on the map regionally. There's people across the region who are used to basically Arab armies being humiliated by the Israelis. Then all of a sudden, this militia stands up and stops the Israelis from invading their country. They developed this aura as this people's army. You start seeing people flying Asballah flags and putting up pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. You would see it in Cairo, you could see it in Damascus. People that are against Israel and might feel that their governments are not doing enough to work against Israel. Then all of a sudden you have, wow, this is the real resistance. That really raises their stock across the Arab world, and they run with it. Hezbollah goes through basically another transformation. Instead of just being a force focused on fighting Israel, they expand into the rest of the Arab world. They start intervening in regional conflicts, sending their people abroad to help out other militias. This is when things start to backfire.

We'll be right back.

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Ben, what does it look like when Hezbollah expands its footprint in the Middle East? Tell me about that.

You remember that from the early days, Hezbollah is very close with Iran. Iran has this idea of the Axis of Resistance. The Axis of Resistance is supposed to be this network of forces throughout the Arab world that are opposed to the United States and that are opposed to Israel and are trying to push back on their interests in the region. These forces exist in different countries, and Hezbollah is the senior member. They're like the older brother of all of these other militias. Everybody looks up to them and see them as this experienced party that can help them get their together. After 2011, this Axis starts to take off, and Hezbollah is really the connective tissue. Hezbollah starts sending out experts, and they start sending out fighters. In less than a year, Hezbollah has turned the tables for Syria's once beleaguered President, Bachshar al-Assad, their Shia ally. They get involved in Syria's civil war. They go to try to help the government of Bachshar al-Assad put down a rebellion against his rule.

The group is now perceived as killing sunny civilians inside Syria on Iran's request.

They train fighters there, and they work alongside them, and many of them participate in battle.

We We do not have spoken about Iraq before, but we have a little bit-Later, they send fighters to Iraq.

They send fighters and trainers to Yemen.

Let's go to any place where we can fight this threat that is threatening our Muslim nation and our region.

So They're freelancing in a way around the Middle East.

Yes, exactly. Many of the Arab governments are watching this happen and wondering why this group that claims to be focused on fighting Israel is suddenly popping up and trying to help Iran out. Worse than that, Hezbollah is actually killing other Arabs. They are fighting on behalf of the Syrian government, and they're killing people on the other side. It begins to tarnish Hezbollah's regional standing and its regional reputation.

That's a very big shift in a very short period of time for Hezbollah.

Yeah, it's a big shift. There's a somewhat similar shift that takes place around the same time inside of Lebanon. Lebanon, as I said before, has an incredibly weak central state, and the country basically starts to fall apart. A tragedy is unfolding in Lebanon. Inflation has driven the country's currency to historical lows. The economy starts falling apart. The banking system begins to fail. Attacks on banks everywhere and people demanding their money.

They've been locked out of their accounts since the financial crisis began in late 2019.

People are going to the banks and trying to get their money out, and the banks basically say, We don't have your money anymore.

The state electricity network has again collapsed. A lack of fuel forced Lebanon's largest power stations to shut down.

There's an electricity crisis where people are going for days without electricity. I mean, it gets to be very, very miserable, and it creates a lot of anger against this political establishment that's been ruling Lebanon for a long time. In 2019, a protest movement begins to try to get rid of them.

1.5 million people, that is a quarter of the population, have taken to the streets over the last five days.

People chant, Revolution, revolution. We want the fall of the regime.

People pour into the streets. They come out in downtown Beirut and in other cities, basically calling for a toppling of the regime. We need to get rid of these people who've been running our country Because they've done such a terrible job. Interestingly, many of them consider Hezbollah as part of this establishment. People come out and they chant against Hezbollah the way that they chant against the other political parties. They very much see them as players in this corrupt system that has brought the country to this breaking point.

In other words, by 2023, Hezbollah is much diminished. And yet when it comes to October seventh, when Hamas attacks Israel, Hezbollah behaves very much in a way that is not diminished. It actually starts attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas.

Why does it do that? This actually fits in very well with Hezbollah's more recent activity of trying to strengthen this axis of resistance, trying to work with these other anti-Israel forces in the region. Hamas attacks Israel. Hamas is a member of the axis of resistance. Israel goes to war with Hamas. Hezbollah says, basically, we need to help Hamas out. And that's what gets us into what we saw over the last 11 months, this low-boil war along the Lebanon-Israel border. And then all of a sudden, we hit this last week, and it all falls apart. Israel launches this massive escalation, and Hezbollah doesn't seem to have seen it coming at all.

Walk me through what Hezbollah's response has been so far.

In terms of statements, it's been largely defiance. Hezbollah leaders have come out. They've promised to keep fighting. They've promised to get vengeance against Israel for these attacks. Militarily, it's been more of the same. They are still launching missiles and rockets across the border at Israeli targets. There has not been significant damage or significant casualties reported on the Israeli side. I think everybody expected that because of Hezbollah's capabilities, if something like this happened, they would be able to mount a really large response, and they haven't. People are still trying to figure out exactly why that is. Is that because they're just unable to do it, either because too many of their people on the border have been wounded or killed? Is it because they can't communicate enough to organize a a broad attack? Or is it that they're wishing that they could take things back to the way that they were last month, where they can have this war going with Israel and they're hitting things, but it's not escalating into this gigantic war?

So just time Relying all of this together, Ben, what do you make of Hezbollah's position here? The group is just in a much different place than the hero status that it used to have when it was the one standing up to Israel and winning.

They are in a much, much different place, both in the region and in Lebanon. Around the region, I think that there's a lot of sadness about the civilian deaths in Lebanon. I think people are very concerned about the damage that's being done in Lebanon. But you hear much less sadness about Hezbollah. I don't see a lot of people moaning that Hezbollah has taken these hits. I think that's because there were a lot of people in the region that were fed up with what they had been up to. And inside of Lebanon as well, I think that there had always been this idea that Hezbollah is there to defend us from Israel and to resist against Israel. But during this war, there were definitely a lot of Lebanese who asked, why did you get us involved in this? Why are you dragging Lebanon into Hamas's war? And so I think people are worried about what Israeli action could do, whether there's going to be a ground invasion, how that's going to be terrible for the country. But I don't think that is a lot of people worried about what it means for the future of Hezbollah.

So Ben, is it possible that given all of this, Hezbollah's weakened stature domestically and in the region, and their loss of key leaders in these most recent round of attacks, that there might actually be a real chance here that Israel could achieve its goal of incapacitating Hezbollah, this threat that they fear most?

It's very hard to predict where this is going, but I can throw out a few ideas. It seems quite clear that Hezbollah today is not what it was, that it has been hit incredibly hard as an organization on multiple levels. This includes taking out many senior leaders with lots of experience. This includes taking out a lot of middle management, and it includes hitting the rank and file. Really across the structure, this is an organization that has taken a deep, deep blow. From what we've seen so far, they're either not capable or choosing not to respond militarily to what the Israelis have done. That suggests that the organization is damaged and that it could be more difficult for them to move forward. But in terms of the question of has Israel achieved or could it achieve what it sets out to do, I think that's a much different question. Israel has tried to get quiet on its northern border by invading Lebanon before twice, and it has not worked. If you make a comparison with Hamas, Israel has been in war with Hamas now for 11 months. Hamas is, by all accounts, a less sophisticated, less experienced fighting force than Hezbollah.

They're also basically trapped inside of Gaza. They have closed borders. They can't move in and out and bring equipment in and out the way that they would like to. Israel has still really struggled to try to destroy this organization as they set out to do. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is more sophisticated. It has the open borders of Lebanon to rearm, to move fighters, and to do other kinds of logistics. So even though serious damage has been done to this organization, it's premature to conclude that we have reached its demise.

Ben, thank you.

Thank you.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today.

My fellow leaders, let us never forget, some things are more important than staying in power. It's your people.

In his final speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Biden made a full-throated defense for America's continued involvement in conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, framing his four years in office as part of a vital effort to safeguard democracy.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, we could have stood by and merely protested. But vice President Harris and I understood that that was an assault on everything this institution was supposed to stand for.

Speaking on the United States defense of Ukraine against Russia's invasion, the President said that America and its allies had, quote, ensured the survival of Ukraine as a free nation, but warned that Ukraine's power to hold off Russia could be fleeting. Fighting.

Innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell. Thousands of thousands of kills, including aid workers. Too many families just located, crowding in the tents, facing a dire humanitarian situation.

On the Middle East, Biden made a point of highlighting civilian casualties in Gaza and said Israel and Hamas should sign on to his ceasefire and hostage plan, while also reiterating his long-held position that Israel has the right to defend itself. But he refrained from weighing in with specifics on Israel's actions in Lebanon, saying only that his administration was, quote, determined to prevent a wider war, and that even as the situation had escalated, he believed that a diplomatic solution was still possible. Today's episode was produced by Diana Wind, Will Reid, Rochelle Bontja, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Marc George. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Ron Niemistow, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE. Special thanks to Ewen Ward, Guida Sad, Christina Goldbaum, and Vivienne Yee. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.