Hezbollah has been influenced by Russian forces fighting alongside them in Syria, raising concerns that the Iran-backed terror group will adapt those tactics for use against Israel, Defense News reported Sunday, citing a forthcoming report from the Israeli National Security Council.
The NSC report asserts that Russian influence may help Hezbollah evolve from a well-armed terrorist group to a more adaptable “learning organization,” with proficiency “more than ever before” in advanced aspects of combat. It raised concerns that Hezbollah’s exposure to Russia’s “operational art”—how it plans attacks and adapts to new situations—threatens to diminish Israel’s military superiority.
The report warned that this could lead to improvements in Hezbollah’s cyber-warfare and special forces capabilities, which, Defense News explained, “could impact the ongoing balance of deterrence even before Israel and Hezbollah get into kinetic confrontations.”
“Electronic warfare, when combined with cyber and kinetic capabilities and proficiency in [Russian operational concepts,] has the potential to create for the IDF ‘blindness’ and ‘deafness’ in certain operations,” warned the NSC report.
Improved, Russian-influenced training for Hezbollah’s special forces could allow the terror group to carry out more sophisticated missions, which could lead to more daring attacks inside Israel. This would raise Hezbollah’s bar for “victory” from merely surviving to actually capturing and holding Israeli territory, likely prolonging any war.
Amos Yadlin, Israel’s former chief of military intelligence, told Defense News that while Hezbollah may learn from Russian tactics and operations, “Sometimes there’s what we call negative learning, meaning lessons that are wrongly applied or applied mistakenly to irrelevant or inappropriate scenarios.” Yadlin acknowledged that Hezbollah has grown stronger since the last major war with Israel in 2006, but claimed that that is due not to Russian influence, but improved weaponry and firepower, including “much more capable rockets and missiles in unbelievable quantities…a spectrum of Iranian UAVs, Yakhont shore-to-ship sea-skimming missiles and even Scuds.”
Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter, the former director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency the Shin Bet, warned in August that any future war between Hezbollah and Israel will be much different than the last one because of the new capabilities that Hezbollah developed while fighting in Syria. This assessment was echoed soon after by Nadav Pollak of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who asserted that Hezbollah’s position within the so-called “resistance axis” of Israel’s enemies was stronger due to its Syria experience.
According to a July report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Israeli officials believe that any future war with Hezbollah has the potential to cause “thousands of civilian deaths” in Israel. Hezbollah has, among other things, threatened to attack ammonium tanks in Haifa, which could kill tens of thousands of people.
The think tank’s vice president for research, Jonathan Schanzer, explained that Hezbollah’s widely-reported tactic of hiding military assets in civilian areas would also lead to mass casualties. Reports emerged two years ago that Hezbollah was offering reduced-price housing to Shi’ite families who allowed the terrorist group to store rocket launchers in their homes. An Israeli defense official told The New York Times in May 2015 that the buildup of Hezbollah’s terror infrastructure in southern Lebanese villages meant that “civilians are living in a military compound” and that their lives were at risk. A few days later, a newspaper linked to Hezbollah bolstered the Israeli assessment.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah boasted in June that all of “its weapons and rockets” come from Iran. Nasrallah’s speech seemed to confirm an assurance given to him last August by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that the nuclear deal presented “a historic opportunity” to confront Israel. Iran recently announced that its military spending would increase by 90 percent in the coming year.
Nasrallah’s comments also call into question assurances made by Secretary of State John Kerry that the U.S. would ensure that Iran could not arm Hezbollah after lifting nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran. “Our primary embargo is still in place,” Kerry said at a Senate hearing last year. “We are still sanctioning them. And, I might add, for those things that we may want to deal with because of their behavior, for instance, Hezbollah, there is a UN resolution, 1701, the prevents the transfer of any weapons to Hezbollah. That will continue and what we need to do is make sure that we’re enforcing it.”
While UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was passed unanimously to end the 2006 war, forbids the arming of Hezbollah, Iran has continued to send the terrorist group weapons and the Security Council has refused to enforce it.
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