Former Mossad counterterrorism chief weighs Israel-Hezbollah clashes in Lebanon

Thousands of people fled the southern suburbs of Beirut after Israel warned of renewed strikes on Hezbollah militants sheltered there, a sharp reminder that the Israel-Hezbollah front remained unstable even after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect on April 17 and was never fully observed by either side. The latest escalation, which the United Nations said resumed on March 2, had already left 3,412 people dead and more than 10,000 injured in Lebanon by June 1.

Oded Ailam, a former head of the Counterterrorism Division in the Mossad and now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, brought the perspective of an Israeli security veteran to a conflict that has grown far beyond a border skirmish. The fighting began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and Hezbollah started firing rockets and artillery at Israeli positions the next day. What followed was not a short exchange, but a prolonged campaign in which each side tested the other’s willingness and ability to absorb punishment.

The scale of that exchange has been severe. According to the Israeli military, more than 1,700 rockets have been fired from Lebanon toward Israel since October 7, 2023, killing 15 Israelis and injuring more than 150 people. United Nations and humanitarian reporting said Israeli strikes in Lebanon had killed at least 1,070 people and displaced more than one million, roughly one-fifth of the country’s population. UN OCHA said that between October 7, 2023 and September 20, 2024, more than 10,200 attacks were exchanged across the Blue Line, including more than 8,300 Israeli attacks that killed at least 752 people in Lebanon and more than 1,900 Hezbollah and allied attacks that killed at least 33 Israelis.

The risk of a broader regional conflict lies in how quickly local retaliation can outrun political control. Israel’s heavy blows against Hezbollah’s leadership and capabilities in September 2024, followed by ground operations in October and a stepped-up air campaign, showed that deterrence had not produced stability, only a more destructive phase of the same war. Hezbollah’s continued fire into Israel, even after battlefield losses, underscored how civilian areas in southern Lebanon and around Beirut remained exposed to sudden escalation.

For Washington, the stakes were equally clear. The ceasefire it helped broker was meant to freeze a dangerous front, but the fighting that resumed in March proved how fragile that arrangement was. If strikes deepened around Beirut, if attacks on northern Israel intensified, or if either side concluded that restraint no longer served deterrence, the border war could widen fast, drawing in larger regional consequences that neither Beirut nor Jerusalem could fully control.