Visitors at a Hezbollah-run tourist jihad museum in Baalbek, Lebanon, on Oct. 15.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
On a hilltop overlooking the ancient city of Baalbek, where the Romans built one of the largest temples in their empire, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militant group, has transformed an anti-aircraft defence site into an open-air jihad tourist museum.
On display are tanks seized from Israeli and Islamic State forces, parked alongside machine-gun-equipped army Jeeps for children to clamber on. There are drones manufactured by Hezbollah, with oversight from Iranian engineers. There is a boat equipped with mortars.
“We have a lot – a lot,” says Abou Fadel, a Hezbollah-appointed guide to the site.
He gestures toward a Soviet-designed tracked vehicle with three missiles pointed toward the sky. It’s an SA-6 surface-to-air missile system, of the kind used by Syria in 1973 to shoot down Israeli aircraft. It’s here for a reason, as an indicator of what’s not on display.
“We are showing this deliberately, to let people know that we have other anti-aircraft equipment, too,” Mr. Fadel says. That includes, he suggests, the S-300, a much more sophisticated system. “Do you think we don’t have S-300?” he says, switching to English for effect. “If Iran has S-300, absolutely Hezbollah will take S-300.” Such a claim cannot be verified.
Israel-Hamas war: Maps and graphics that show how the conflict is unfolding
A Soviet-designed SA-6 surface-to-air missile system on display.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
But the very possibility underscores the potency of the threat posed by Hezbollah, as Israel wages war on the Hamas militants that rule the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, like Hezbollah, is backed by Iran and has long opposed Israel, at times with armed violence. But Hezbollah has amassed far more fearsome firepower.
Among the most dangerous questions for Israel is whether its actions in Gaza will prod Hezbollah to direct its full arsenal toward a second front.
“Everyone is looking at Hezbollah and wondering what they’re going to do,” said Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program.
Already, the rumble of warfare is echoing along Lebanon’s border with Israel, which on Sunday dispatched helicopters to attack what it called military targets in Lebanon after receiving anti-tank fire that killed one man in an Israeli co-operative. Israel has now cleared a four-kilometre buffer zone from the border with Lebanon.
Visitors at the Hezbollah-run tourist jihad museum.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
The spectre of war with Hezbollah is serious enough that it has prompted the U.S. into a pre-emptive response. The U.S. has dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean, one already in position, to demonstrate “our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Saturday.
Hezbollah is considered the most powerful non-state actor in the world.
Its equipment and training form a crucial part of Iran’s defence against Israel, a muscular shield for Tehran against any attempt to destroy its nuclear capabilities.
Formed in 1982, the year Israel invaded Lebanon, Hezbollah has decades of fighting experience, most recently in Syria. Before that, it fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006. It has spent the 13 years since transforming itself into a more formidable adversary.
Israeli military planners call Hezbollah their country’s gravest threat. Hezbollah’s fighting ranks have swelled to more than 60,000, at least 12 times its size in 2006, observers say. Its sub-ballistic missiles can deliver 500-kilogram warheads to targets 300 kilometres away, with 10- to 20-metre precision. It possesses anti-ship missiles and an estimated 130,000 rockets, enough to challenge Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome air defence system.
“They think they can hit everything from nuclear reactors to electricity infrastructure to water infrastructure, and that’s throughout Israel,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Israel having to incur that while it’s fighting Gaza – it’s going to be a super heavy blow.”
On display are tanks seized from Israeli and Islamic State forces, parked alongside machine-gun-equipped army Jeeps for children to clamber on.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel have splintered old assumptions, she said.
“We are now entering a transition period where new rules of the game are going to be renegotiated violently.”
Old assumptions may no longer apply, including the belief that Iran would only mobilize Hezbollah if Iranian territory were to come under attack. Instead, Tehran’s desire to preserve its “axis of resistance” may press it to act if one part of that axis faces an existential threat – such as Israel’s bid to destroy Hamas, or at the least eliminate its leadership.
“This Iran now in place is much more radical, much more confident, and Hezbollah is much more sure of its ability to make Israel pay a very high cost,” Ms. Slim said.
With Israeli forces girding for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip this weekend, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, warned Sunday that “if the Zionist aggressions do not stop, the hands of all parties in the region are on the trigger,” in comments reported by state media.
For Hezbollah to go to war with Israel would mark a break from a bloody truce the two sides have observed since 2006, during which they have shelled each other, but within bounds calculated to avoid escalation to war. Even the intensification in recent days appears to be Hezbollah “purposefully messaging,” said Tobias Borck, a specialist in Middle East security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The spectre of war with Hezbollah is serious enough that it has prompted the U.S. into a pre-emptive response.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
That message, he said, is: “‘Hamas, we’re with you, solidarity and all that.’ But also: ‘Israel, this is not us doing the big one.’”
Israel’s heavy bombardment of Gaza has made tangible the consequences for Hezbollah if it escalates, and Hezbollah has already lost the ability to launch a surprise attack or seize hostages from just across the border.
“No person in their sound mind would open a front against Israel from Lebanon,” said Hilal Khashan, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. “Hamas did what they did knowing they were committing suicide.”
Hezbollah, too, must consider the domestic consequences if it acts. The group is deeply entwined in Lebanon, a country in a years-long political and economic crisis. “There will be a massive backlash in Lebanon for Hezbollah getting involved in the war and bringing yet more ruin,” said Mr. Blanford, the author of Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.
Unless the Hamas attack demonstrates that Iran has abandoned its historical calculus, Tehran is unlikely to gamble too heavily with the “most effective component of their deterrence architecture,” he said. It’s also not clear that Israel has any incentive to open a second front at the moment.
Visitors walk through the museum.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
More likely than a full confrontation with Hezbollah, Mr. Blanford said, are clashes that intensify – as they have already – and build to conflict that lasts several days but “would fall short of an all-out war.”
Still, the attacks now drawing daily blood on the Israeli-Lebanese border raise the risk of miscalculation.
In Baalbek, Mr. Fadel offers a dark warning about the days ahead.
“If Israel decides to invade Gaza by land, something else will happen,” he says.
What that is, “I will see – and you will see.”