Alan Jacobson

For 40 years Iran built a ring of fire around Israel. The jewel in the crown was Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s own jewel was the complex it dug into the Ali Taher range—the closest base of that caliber to the “little Satan.” Yesterday, it fell to the IDF. Twenty years in the making, with Iranian help and enormous expense, the base contained command-and-control rooms, weapons and supply depots and field clinics, all buried 30 to 50 meters into solid rock. Just ten kilometers from the Israeli border, with a clear view of the Litani and the Israeli Hula Valley, it was the place from which Hezbollah intended to coordinate its own October 7 in the Galilee. Israeli forces first reached the ridge on the thirty-first of May. By the twelfth of June, the division had taken Kfar Tibnit and the main body of the ridge. Then the ceasefire, a week later, leaving 40 Hezbollah fighters trapped beneath Israel’s feet. An assault would have inflicted casualties Israel was unwilling to absorb and broken a ceasefire it was unwilling to break. So they began a siege. They shot down every attempt at relief, infiltrators and supply drones alike, and escalated steadily from there—pushing their own drones into the shafts, running loudspeakers into the ground around the clock. After a summer of siege, the men below broke—some retreating, others unable—leaving the IDF in full control of the ridge. In mid-August, Iran warned Washington that a full Israeli assault on Ali Taher would draw a large-scale response. More than a dozen IRGC personnel were on the ridge, three officials told Reuters, including at least two senior officers. Set aside the obvious question of what a foreign army’s officers were doing on sovereign soil—after all, it isn’t sovereign, it’s Lebanon. The fortress has now fallen, and the question of a response falls to Iran. The trouble is that the Iran that made the threat is not the same Iran that has to keep it. In the intervening month, the United States blinded Tehran in the strait, restored much of the commercial shipping it had disrupted, and drew the economic noose tighter. A month of siege has sapped much of the bravado from the Islamic Republic. They have three options: a large response, a small one, or silence. A large response inevitably resumes the war. The prospect has its attractions for a regime on the edge: wartime discipline is the easiest form of crowd control, and if Iran is even weaker than we believe, a heroic death in resistance is well within Jihadist sensibilities. A small response risks arriving at the same place by accident—Israel is eager to answer disproportionately to any provocation and weaken the regime further. They may still risk it. But Tehran has had chances to significantly escalate in recent weeks and declined every one, settling instead for the uneasy equilibrium of neither war nor peace. It is a tightrope, and the regime may well make it to the other side. But while desperately trying to balance it won’t be able to stop Israel plucking the jewels from its crown, one fortress at a time.