Lebanon’s Hezbollah weighs dueling appeals: Ease attacks or escalate

One ominous hint came Sunday in a 12-second video posted on a Telegram channel affiliated with Hezbollah. It opens with the group’s yellow-and-olive logo and, as martial music swells, a fuzzy silhouette of Nasrallah walks by in slow motion.

That same day, Hezbollah announced it had struck an Israeli drone with surface-to-air missiles — marking the first time the group appeared to have downed a drone and successfully launched surface-to-air missiles.

In recent weeks, Arab and Muslim countries have put out repeated calls for cease-fires in Gaza, the language in their statements becoming sharper as the death toll rises.

But Hamas’s recent allies — all Iranian-aligned and critical of perceived Arab indifference over Gaza — took matters into their own hands. The Houthi group in Yemen responded by launching missiles at Israel across the Red Sea. The Islamic Resistance of Iraq attacked U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq.

As Israeli attacks on Gaza intensified — with strikes hitting hospitals and leveling neighborhoods — impatience has swelled among Hezbollah’s base. One of the group’s founding premises is to be a resisting force to Israel.

A well-known Lebanese singer even put out a piece beseeching Nasrallah to act. On Oct. 11, Ali Barakat released a song titled “For God’s Sake, Oh Sayyed Let’s Go,” a reference to the respectful title of “sayeed” used for Nasrallah by many of his followers.

“Sayyed Hasan, our beloved one, strike and destroy Tel Aviv,” Barakat sings in the song’s first line.

Nasrallah’s planned speech was described by Hezbollah as an event to honor those killed in the fight “to defend Lebanon and support Gaza, the Palestinian people and holy sites.”

Israel has repeatedly minimized the threat at its northern border. On Tuesday, the head of Israel’s National Security Council, Tzachi Hanegbi, was asked if Israel would adopt the same approach to Hezbollah as it did Hamas: seeking to destroy the group.

“We have decided at this moment, in order to best serve our goals, if we spread ourselves too thinly we will not be able to concentrate on the specific goals and strongly hit our targets,” he said.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has upped the ante. It has struck deeper into Israel, and Israel has responded by striking deeper into Lebanon. On Thursday, the eve of Nasrallah’s speech, Hezbollah announced it had struck 19 positions in Israel simultaneously. It also announced its first use of self-detonating drones.

Amal Saad, a lecturer of politics and international relations at Cardiff University who closely follows Hezbollah, said the much bolder attacks this week have been “qualitatively different” and suggest that former rules of engagement for Hezbollah’s fighters have been “abandoned.”

One prominent sign of this change, she added, was a letter signed by the “Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance” — meaning Hezbollah fighters. The letter, released Wednesday, was the first instance in which Hezbollah militia factions issued a letter addressed to someone other than Nasrallah. This one was sent directly to the people and fighters in Gaza.

“Our hand is with yours on the trigger,” it said, “and be certain that your martyrs and our martyrs are the path to Jerusalem.”

Saad said the timing of the letter and the escalation of Hezbollah attacks are not coincidental. “What’s been happening this past week is the run-up to [Nasrallah’s speech],” she said, noting that the letter could signal a “new phase in the war.”

The fighters are “essentially saying, we are ready and willing. There’s a full unity of ranks, brothers in arms,” she said. Such letters have cropped up rarely: once during Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, and then in 2017 during Hezbollah’s battles with the Islamic State.

“In the midst of the war, they are addressing Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups, and stating their readiness and eagerness to join ranks, if the need arises,” she said.

Yet no one else in Lebanon appears ready to rush into another war with Israel. The country has been crushed by an economic and banking crisis and by a warehouse blast in 2020 that destroyed sections of the capital, Beirut. Lebanon’s last war with Israel, a 34-day conflict in 2006, is estimated to have killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and fewer than 50 Israeli civilians. It displaced up to 1 million people in Lebanon, according to the United Nations.

Israel has repeated its threats to Lebanese leaders in recent weeks, via European messengers: If Hezbollah enters the war, Israel will not spare much of the country.

All of Lebanon now seems to be holding its breath over what Nasrallah will say. While Hezbollah’s followers share more videos, others have resorted to cracking dark jokes, in typical Arab fashion. One post on X, formerly known as Twitter, summed up the worries in a fictional conversation between two people:

“Do you want to go out on the weekend?”

“Depends what happens Friday.”

Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.