BEIRUT // One day after the news broke that the notorious Lebanese militant Samir Kuntar had been killed in an Israeli air strike, Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah responded the way he always does: by vowing to retaliate, on Hizbollah’s terms.
“It is our right to retaliate for the assassination in the place, time and manner we deem appropriate,” said Mr Nasrallah in a speech late on Monday broadcast by Hizbollah’s TV station Al Manar. “It is our right, and I will add tonight, that we in Hizbollah will practice this right with the help of God.”
While Hizbollah always vows major retaliations and talks tough after assassinations by Israel, they do not always follow through. Despite the aggressive public posturing, much of Hizbollah’s resources are devoted to fighting in Syria on behalf of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad and along Lebanon’s border with Syria against ISIL and Jabhat Al Nusra. Opening a third front would be unwise and the group has been seen as trying to avoid a conflict with Israel since it got involved in Syria.
But that same involvement in Syria – breaking from Hizbollah’s origins of confronting Israel – also puts pressure on the group to remember their old enemy.
In the past, Hizbollah reactions to assassinations have been mixed.
On February 12, 2008, Hizbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh was killed in the Kfar Sousa neighbourhood of Damascus when a bomb fixed to his vehicle detonated.
He was one of Hizbollah’s most important leaders and is accused of being behind the group’s most high profile attacks of the 1980s, including bombings of the US embassy and marine barracks in Beirut and the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in 1985.
But while Mughniyeh’s name was legendary among Hizbollah’s fighters and supporters – and his enemies in foreign intelligence services – the man himself was seemingly invisible. It was when he died that he became a real celebrity. No longer needing to worry about security, Hizbollah released images of Mughniyeh, finally giving a face to their operative.
Now his pictures hang across Hizbollah-dominated areas and replicas of the distinctive olive green hat he is seen wearing are sold in shops.
Mr Nasrallah repeatedly vowed retaliation and “open war” for Mughniyeh’s killing, though if it happened, it has not been announced.
On December 4, 2013, another senior Hizbollah commander, Hassan Al Laqqis, was gunned down in Beirut with silenced pistols as he walked through his apartment building’s garage. A Sunni militant group claimed responsibility for the killing, but Israel is still seen as a prime suspect and Mr Nasrallah said it would be “punished” for the murder.
Like Mughniyeh, Laqqis’ importance in Hizbollah was not widely known until he was killed. He lived in the shadows, avoiding attention and not even travelling with bodyguards. And like Mughniyeh, his death was not followed with a claimed retaliation.
Hizbollah would finally publicly retaliate for one of its prominent members being killed when Mughniyeh’s son Jihad died alongside an Iranian general and several Hizbollah fighters in a suspected Israeli air strike in the Golan Heights in January.
Ten days after the strike, Hizbollah militants ambushed an Israeli military convoy in the disputed Shebaa Farms along the border with Lebanon. Anti-tank missiles destroyed two Israeli vehicles and killed two soldiers. Israel responded with artillery barrages that killed a Spanish UN peacekeeper. But neither side looked like they wanted to provoke a conflict and the situation de-escalated.
Several factors indicate that Hizbollah may also retaliate for Kuntar’s assassination.
Like Jihad Mughniyeh, Kuntar had a place and legacy in Hizbollah’s propaganda that was known while he was still alive. He was a rare public face among Hizbollah militants.
A Druze whose initial military experience was with a secular Palestinian group, Kuntar was not trained by Hizbollah. Rather, he was adopted by the group after he was freed in 2008 after 29 years in Israeli prison, as part of a deal where Hizbollah traded the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for jailed militants.
As the longest-held Lebanese prisoner in Israel, Kuntar immediately became a celebrity in Lebanon and eagerly returned the embrace of Hizbollah, which did not exist when he was first jailed.
It remains unclear what Kuntar’s role in Hizbollah was. Given that he was only 16 when he was arrested, his lack of battlefield experience makes it unlikely that he was a major military commander. But after his release he became increasingly important to the group and a public face for an organisation where many of the key players are faceless until death.
He was somebody, besides Mr Nasrallah, who Hizbollah supporters and allies could rally around.
The more embroiled Hizbollah has become in Syria, the more the group has come under pressure to confront Israel, the country Hizbollah was established to fight. To its constituency, the group has attempted to portray its defence of Mr Al Assad as part of its fight against Israel. But at the end of the day, Hizbollah’s deployment in Syria is tactical, to prop up an ally who provides arms and support. And it is a deployment that they have devoted the bulk of their resources to, bringing many fighters far from the hills of southern Lebanon and farmland of northern Israel where they envisioned fighting when they signed up.
For Hizbollah, Israel has taken a back seat to the war in Syria for now.
The group’s involvement in Syria has also given Israel a free hand to strike Hizbollah targets there when they feel like it. Israel avoids such actions in Lebanon, presumably out of fear of attacking Hizbollah on its own turf and igniting a war, but shows no such hesitation in war torn Syria.
By responding to Kuntar’s assassination, Hizbollah can send a message to Israel that its attacks in Syria will not go unpunished.
However, an actual conflict with Israel would stretch Hizbollah’s ranks even thinner and have the group fighting on three fronts. Hizbollah is aware of its military limitations and has also been seen in recent years as keen to avoid the kind of destruction Lebanon witnessed in the 2006 war with Israel. Following that conflict, Mr Nasrallah said that if he had known his group’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers would spark a war, he would not have done it.
Israel is likely to act cautiously as well. Igniting a new conflict with Hizbollah would intensify the regional vortex of violence and complicate a civil war in Syria that comes right up to Israel’s frontier.
If a retaliation does come from Hizbollah, it will likely be limited in scope, like the group’s actions in January: enough to hurt and punish Israel, but not enough to provoke all-out war.
But as the 2006 war shows, operations calculated to be limited can quickly spiral out of control.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
