Why Hezbollah won’t fire its most advanced missiles at Israel – yet

[Pelican Press 0]

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Why Hezbollah won’t ***** its most advanced missiles at ******* – yet

It might be foolhardy to poke the Russian bear, but poking the Lebanese one seems to be a different matter.

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is almost unquestionably the world’s most formidable non-state fighting force. Its military capability exceeds that of the armies of many Middle Eastern states, Lebanon among them. Its vast arsenal includes guided missiles that could hit any ******** city.

Yet the group’s response to days of provocation has been pretty tepid so far.

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, the Hezbollah leader, had repeatedly warned ******* that any airstrikes on its strongholds in southern Beirut would be met with a salvo of rocket strikes on Tel Aviv.

In the past two months, ******* has twice bombed the Lebanese capital, ******** some of Nasrallah’s

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. Last week, thousands of

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in synchronised attacks on the group’s pagers and walkie-talkie radios.

Hezbollah’s response has not quite been to bend over and ask for more.

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Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, has repeatedly warned ******* over airstrikes – Al-Manar/AFP/Getty Images

This weekend, it

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since it began ******* into northern ******* in solidarity with ****** last October.

The barrage followed with a declaration that Hezbollah is now in an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with *******.

But the group has deliberately not targeted ******** population centres, nor has it deployed its most sophisticated weaponry. It has spoken menacingly but vaguely about retaliation at an unspecified time in the future.

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This is well short of a full-scale declaration of war, that some of its fighters are itching for – so why the coyness?

The most obvious answer is that Iran is restraining the group. Hezbollah is Tehran’s most powerful proxy force in the Middle East. Its precision-guided missiles, like the Fateh 110 with a range of 300km, and its ******* drones come from Iran.

The Iranian regime, however, regards Hezbollah as its insurance policy if ******* attacks its nuclear programme. The more missiles Hezbollah fires, the more Iran’s deterrent is eroded. The group has to sing to its paymaster’s tune.

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But Hezbollah’s leadership is also reluctant to escalate the conflict too far for reasons of its own.

Some of those are to do with domestic opinion, said Kassem Kassir, a Lebanese commentator with close links to Hezbollah and inside knowledge into its thinking. The other reasons concern the group’s fears that embracing war would be to

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, *******’s prime minister.

“There are two things to take into consideration,” Mr Kassir told The Telegraph. “The first is internal. Hezbollah knows that Lebanon is divided and so does not want to take the country into a war that some do not want.

“The other is that Hezbollah knows Netanyahu is trying to draw it into an all-out war in the hope of drawing the ******* States into the conflict.”

“Hezbollah knows that if it fell for this, any war would not just be with ******* but also with *******’s western backers,” he added.

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Hezbollah members march during the ******** of comrades ******* in a recent ******** strike in Beirut – Bilal Hussein/AP

Hezbollah is much better equipped than it was in 2006 when its forces fought *******’s to a standstill in a ******* 34-day confrontation in southern Lebanon.

During that conflict, the group had just 15,000 mostly unguided rockets, ******* off just 4,000 of them.

But even though it now has an arsenal 10 times greater in number and far more potent, Mr Kassir said Hezbollah would far rather engage ******* in a longer low-level conflict that weakens its resolve rather than ***** its full firepower in a single confrontation it probably cannot win.

“Weakening ******* through an attritional, drawn out confrontation is, in my opinion, the strategy Hezbollah prefers,” he said.

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#Hezbollah #wont #***** #advanced #missiles #*******

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