Inside Biden’s Push to Head Off an Israel-Hezbollah War

The Biden administration has dispatched a seasoned envoy to try to strike a major diplomatic deal in the Middle East even against the backdrop of war. Amos Hochstein, a deputy assistant to the president, has accompanied Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a trip to the region to respond to the growing regional crisis sparked by the Israel-Hamas war.

Hochstein has been tasked with trying to ease tensions between Israel and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah in a bid to head off a new front in the war that could be much deadlier than the ongoing one against Hamas.

Hochstein held meetings with senior Israeli officials this week and is headed to Beirut on Thursday to continue discussions over how to prevent an Israel-Hezbollah war from opening. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is considered one of the most heavily armed nonstate actors in the world and has a massive stockade of an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 missiles and rockets aimed at Israel.

Lebanon’s government has signaled that it wants to restart talks on implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the deadly 2006 Israel-Lebanon war and called for the withdrawal of all armed forces other than the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers from a region at the border between the two countries and the Litani River. Though the war ended, the resolution was never fully implemented.

Hezbollah maintains a sizable military presence in the region, as does Israel in response to the threat from the militant group. The 2006 war killed some 1,100 people and displaced nearly a million. A restart of that war today could be even bloodier.

On Wednesday, Herzi Halevi, the chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces, told a gathering of Israeli soldiers that their performance in the recent fighting in Gaza had convinced him that they would be successful in fighting a war in Lebanon, too. “We’ve fought in Gaza, so we know how to do it in Lebanon if we have to,” he said, according to a statement from the Israeli army. “After what you did [in Gaza], there is not a village in Lebanon that you cannot enter and destroy.” Israeli forces have killed more than 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the war with Hamas began on Oct. 7, 2023, and top U.N. officials warn that Gaza is on the brink of famine.

As it stands, both sides agree that something needs to change on the Israel-Lebanon border, but neither side knows how to get there. All the while, officials and experts fear, the prospect of a full Israel-Hezbollah war increases with each passing day, as cross-border skirmishes boost the chance of miscalculations or missteps that could spiral into a war.

During a meeting this week with Joanna Wronecka, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib called for dialing back Israel-Hezbollah tensions by fully implementing Resolution 1701. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Hochstein on Jan. 4 and “made it clear Israel is committed to bringing about a fundamental change on its border with Lebanon,” his office stated in the readout of the meeting, though Israel has threatened to step up attacks on Hezbollah if it deems the threat of larger attacks likely.

The prospects of any diplomatic breakthrough on Israel-Lebanon border talks are slim, though, experts and officials concede. Israel’s war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s attacks against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, has morphed into one of the world’s deadliest war zones and largest humanitarian crises.

It has also already spread beyond the immediate borders of Israel and the Palestinian territories as other Iranian proxy groups strike out against U.S. military installations in Iraq and Syria and at strategic commercial maritime trade routes in the Red Sea from Yemen.

Israel and Hezbollah have struck out at each other in limited cross-border skirmishes for months, and Israel upped the ante by reportedly killing a senior Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon and senior Hamas figure near Beirut in recent days in separate strikes.

Hezbollah and its patrons in Iran for now seem content with the status quo—keeping Israeli forces staged near Lebanon’s border and engaged in skirmishes without fully joining Hamas’s fight—but that could change with one miscalculation or skirmish that gets out of hand.

“What we have here is a race against time,” said Firas Maksad, an expert at the Middle East Institute. “On one hand, you have this diplomatic effort, spearheaded by the U.S. and Hochstein, and on the other hand, you have the drums of war beating.”

If anyone can bring both Israel and Lebanon to the table, however, experts say it’s Hochstein. Hochstein’s clunky title—deputy assistant to the president and senior advisor for energy and investment—belies his deep contacts in the region and rare reputation of diplomatic success in the Middle East. Hochstein, now at the White House, acts as a sort of diplomatic Swiss Army knife for the president on thorny diplomatic issues, after notching a significant win for the administration while at the State Department as a senior envoy for energy and infrastructure issues from 2021 to 2023. In 2022, Hochstein brokered a deal between Israel and Lebanon to resolve their long-running maritime border dispute. “He does enjoy a track record of success and trust in both countries,” Maksad said.

Other Western allies are backstopping U.S. diplomatic efforts, namely Lebanon’s former colonial power France. Late last year, Paris dispatched a slew of senior officials to Lebanon, including Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna and Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s special envoy for Lebanon, in a bid to dial down Israel-Hezbollah tensions and lay the groundwork for diplomatic talks. But officials in Beirut and Israel believe only the United States has the clout and leverage with both sides to strike any lasting deal.

Many experts doubt that Hochstein can pull off a full diplomatic coup and get both sides to fully implement Resolution 1701, but they say there’s a chance he can at least get the ball rolling.

One point in his favor: It’s in both sides’ interests to start diplomatic talks and prevent a major war, Maksad said. “The cost of such a war would be so high and so devastating for both sides that I don’t see how it could be in Israel’s interest to plunge into a devastating war against Hezbollah, particularly when the Gaza operation is still ongoing, when Hezbollah is exponentially more powerful than Hamas, and when the U.S. administration is putting all its weight on Netanyahu not to open a second front,” he said.

Another is that Hezbollah appears amenable to accepting talks. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, delivered an interesting diplomatic overture himself that could pave the way for diplomacy. During a speech on Friday, he vowed to avenge the death of Saleh al-Arouri, the senior Hamas commander killed by an Israeli strike near Beirut, but he also said there is a “historic opportunity for the complete liberation of all our territories and to establish an equation that will prevent the enemy from violating our sovereignty”—interpreted as a reference to border talks between Lebanon and Israel. However, Nasrallah added that any such discussions would take place only after the war in Gaza ends.

Lebanon likely needs a fig leaf from Israel to kick-start the process. One possible fig leaf would be Israel signaling a willingness to discuss some of the 13 disputed points along Israel and Lebanon’s land border that have yet to be resolved. There are other possible avenues for negotiations to go: Both sides agreeing to dial back their cross-border strikes or, for the Israeli side, convincing Hezbollah to agree to withdraw at least some of its forces away from the Israeli border—particularly its elite Radwan special operations forces, which Israeli officials view as one of the top threats to the northern border.

But experts say it’s Iran, not Lebanon, that has the deciding vote in Hezbollah’s next moves, no matter how closely the Israeli and Lebanese governments align during future talks.

“A window of opportunity for diplomacy certainly exists,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior U.S. intelligence official now at the Atlantic Council. “I am skeptical about the amount of influence the Lebanese government has here given the Iran factor. It makes it much more challenging than Hochstein’s negotiations on the [Israel-Lebanon] maritime border dispute.”

And in Israel, Netanyahu’s coalition government, composed of extreme far-right politicians, may not give him any room to maneuver on negotiations with Lebanon.

Officials and experts in the region are closely watching a number of early factors to see whether these diplomatic efforts can go anywhere. The first is to see what Hochstein says publicly, if anything, coming out of his meetings in Beirut following intensive discussions with Israeli officials. The second is to watch what senior Lebanese officials with close connections to Hezbollah say in the coming weeks, particularly Lebanon’s speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, seen as one of the most influential conduits in Beirut to the militant group. The third is to see whether Hezbollah’s retaliations to the Israeli assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas commanders dramatically escalate the situation or stop at limited drone strikes and fiery rhetoric, thus preventing another tit-for-tat spiral of violence.

For now, the region rests on a knife’s edge. “We’re at the most dangerous time for an escalation into a broader war than at any point since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” Panikoff said.