Making assumptions has lethal consequences in the Mideast cauldron

JERUSALEM – When the New York Times wants to, it can still be an excellent newspaper, capable of funding the kind of deep investigative reporting few other news organizations can match. It was exactly this reporting, which provided two highly noteworthy stories about Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah over the last 48 hours or so.

One concerned the Mossad beeper operation, which was carried out with such seemingly spectacular success on Sept. 17 and 18, and how close it came to being rumbled, following suspicions a Hezbollah technician had about them. The other regarded the confidence former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah exuded that the IDF would not target him.

“As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on Sept. 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Mr Nasrallh brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by Israel and shared later with Western allies. In his view, Israel had no interest in a full-scale war,” reported the Times.

This is a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the most feared leaders of either country or organization across the Middle East. The report goes on to say Nasrallah didn’t realize Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement, and had been for years, although this almost seems secondary. The point, however, is the Hezbollah leader made a judgment call, based on a pre-Oct. 7 assessment, which was no longer accurate.

“Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him.”

Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence @nytimes pic.twitter.com/k5ULE90u39

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) December 29, 2024

In hindsight, it also appears unnecessarily hubristic, given that Israel’s response to the killing at the end of July of 12 Druze children playing soccer on a Majdal Shams court, was the elimination – in Hezbollah’s Dahiyeh neighborhood stronghold – of the man who was effectively Nasrallah’s number two and most trusted lieutenant, Fuad Shukr. It seems incredible this was not a clue as to what his future might be, and that Israel may have released the shackles from its intelligence services. He was thought to be a ghost, a person people spoke of but who was rarely seen in public – for that very reason. Having been identified and pinpointed, Israel’s Air Force rammed a missile through his window.

What’s even more extraordinary is the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran – in a compound run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – when he attended the inauguration of Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, did not see Nasrallah taking visibly more robust security measures. Although Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz only recently admitted in the last few days the country’s hand in Haniyeh’s elimination – which was apparently nearly thwarted due to a faulty air conditioner – one could imagine the kinds of conversations taking place in bunkers and hideouts across swaths of the Middle East, with the logical assumption being that the Jewish state most probably had a hand in his demise.

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Nasrallah seemed to think the old rules of engagement still held vis-a-vis his attitude toward Israel, but Oct. 7, which in itself was the result of a catastrophic failure of imagination and assumption-holding on the Jewish state’s part, and the ensuing struggle for its survival had altered everything.

It’s an important comparison point, because Israel’s political and military leadership had been wary of engaging Hezbollah in an all-out war, with the almost incalculably catastrophic predictions of tens of thousands of civilian deaths just on Israel’s side – let alone what would happen to civilians embedded next to Islamist fighters in southern Lebanon. A different article could be written on the miracle of how relatively few civilian casualties there have been on both sides of the border.

And this whole reordering of the entire Middle East can be traced back to the locus of the Oct. 7 attacks. Israel’s political and military leadership had assumed Hamas was placated, awash as its leaders at least, were, in Qatari cash, even if precious little found its way to regular Gazans. Israel thought its more lethal enemies were Hezbollah in Beirut and the Islamic regime in Tehran, particularly its nuclear ambitions. Whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks there should be an official inquiry on the lines of the 1974 Agranat Commission following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, there will be a reckoning for those egregious failures. Israel’s own hubris, assessing Hamas was becalmed, has cost more than 2,000 lives.

Hamas too, and in particular its now eliminated leader Yahya Sinwar also made assumptions. He thought the Iranian proxies he thought were his allies would come more muscularly to his aid when the inevitable Israeli ground incursion into Gaza came. He hoped Hezbollah would fire more even more rockets at Israel’s civilians, particularly the north, which the government quickly emptied. Sinwar thought he’d get more support from Iran, and assessed Israel would get less back-up from the United States than it received.

Sinwar also calculated that international pressure on Israel, which has been intense and carried out through various governmental and non-governmental bodies, such as the United Nations, and the two courts; the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, would halt Israel’s Gaza offensive. To some extent, the slow-walking of aid the Biden-Harris administration has been responsible for has been to hint at the success of Sinwar’s strategy, but his own demise, as well as most of the top echelons of Hamas’ leadership highlights the folly of his plan.

Iran too calculated its two ballistic missile attacks on Israel would not incur excessive blowback. Israel in return had assumed it would not be able to strike Iran with anything like the success it had – effectively taking out its entire anti-aircraft system – especially without the loss of a single aircraft.

Even the United States, under the “expert tutelage” of Vice President Kamala Harris who had “studied the maps” assumed along with military analysts that an Israeli assault on Khan Younis – one of Hamas’ main strongholds in the Gaza Strip would result in hundreds if not thousands of dead and wounded IDF soldiers. The cost in men and materiel was orders of magnitude less than had been predicted. Also, the length of time it took to rout Hamas was a fraction of the initial assessments.

Oct. 7 really did change the rules of the game in the Middle East. Nasrallah failed to understand this, and it cost him his life.