A preemptive strike on Iran and Hezbollah - the strategic vs the tactical - analysis

There is non-stop talk of Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran and on Hezbollah, given that Jerusalem has been waiting since the July 31 killings of Hezbollah’s military chief and Hamas’s political chief (while he was in Tehran) for an expected massive retaliation from Lebanon and from the Islamic Republic.

As time has dragged on and the certainty of retaliation also grows, more and more analysts have asked why Israel should wait to be hit with unprecedented power from these two enemy states if it can instead hit them first and reduce the effectiveness of the expected attacks.

With rife speculation about what preemptive strikes might look like, The Jerusalem Post dug into the issue and found that a variety of factors must be treated differently in the IDF’s thinking, rather than be lumped together.

First, there is much more IDF support for preemptively striking Hezbollah than for preemptively striking Iran.

Many IDF officials have wanted to strike Hezbollah since October 11, and Lebanon is a much smaller and closer territory, and one that the IDF can relatively easily enter with ground forces simultaneously with a massive air attack.

Also, while Hezbollah in some ways can strike Israel’s northern areas with greater likelihood of success by virtue of being so close to the Jewish state’s border, its weapons are still far less powerful and sophisticated than Iran’s huge arsenal of ballistic missiles.

This does not mean that Israel will preemptively strike Hezbollah, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is generally firmly against such a strike, and even the defense establishment is less sure about it now than they were on October 11.

For one thing, Israel has much less international support now than it did four days after the October 7 massacre of Israelis and others in southern Israel.

How can Israel eliminate all, or most, of Iran's aerial threats?

Iran is also a huge territory and it is unclear whether an Israeli preemptive strike could eliminate all or even most of the Islamic Republic’s aerial threats before they could hit Israel.

This is especially true now that Tehran is already highly mobilized, such that there would be no major strategic surprise advantage.

According to this thinking, while the benefits of preemptively striking Hezbollah might debatably outweigh the costs, this is less likely with Iran, and a preemptive strike might only be a tactical advantage that would make an even harsher Iranian response more likely.

There are also questions about what kinds of targets to hit preemptively.

It would be quite a different matter for Israel to make a narrow preemptive strike on a single or small series of Hezbollah or Iranian rocket or missile launch sites that were literally about to fire on Israel.

Such attacks could be seen by the US as limited self-defense that would not give Hezbollah or Iran any additional “right” or motivation to make their retaliation larger, nor would it necessarily make a general war more likely.

In contrast, a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities or sources of power for either Hezbollah or Iran, which was not connected to an imminent attack, would be seen by the US as an aggressive move that could make a general war more likely.

Such attacks could reduce US and allied concrete support for Israel’s defense against retaliation from the Jewish state’s enemies.

This is why Israeli sources are emphasizing a need to get American sign-offs on intelligence of imminent attacks by Iran and Hezbollah.

Overall, Israel appears to be in a defensive posture in order to keep the benefits of US and allied defensive assistance, but with some openness to narrow tactical and limited attacks to prevent imminent strikes, especially from Hezbollah, with even such tactical attacks being less likely against Iran – given that its distance also gives more time to shoot down any aerial threats.