Why Hezbollah Isn't Joining Hamas in Total War Against Israel

'We still need time… but we are winning in increments': Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah praises the Hamas assault of October 7, but he is not hurrying to join the fight. For Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, conditions are not yet ripe for the big regional war

David Daoud - Haaretz / Opinion

In two recent appearances, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah stressed the organization's support for "the resistance" in Gaza, but also its complete lack of involvement in the October 7 assault on Israel by Hamas.

Earlier this month, for example, Nasrallah implausibly alleged that Hezbollah had actively entered the ongoing war "without any foreknowledge, truthfully and honestly, learning [about its outbreak] on [that] Saturday like everyone else."

This ostensible distancing does not mark the end of the resistance axis (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and other groups) "unifying the fronts" against Israel. Rather, Hezbollah - at Iran's behest - is trying to preserve its physical strength and the potency of its ideology to fight the Jewish state from a more advantageous position in the future.

Several factors suggest Hezbollah - and Iran's involvement in approving, planning and preparing Al-Aqsa Flood, including helping develop its blueprint. It is hardly coincidental that Al-Aqsa Flood unfolded exactly like Hezbollah's threat to "liberate the Galilee" would have: a territorially limited incursion targeting border military installations and towns to kidnap and kill as many Israelis as possible, and create a perception of victory - rather than conquer territory.

Credible reports indicate much of Iranian approval, assistance, training and oversight for the October 7 assault occurred in Lebanon where Hezbollah is dominant and has long acted as Iran's conduit to Palestinian factions.

That Hamas likely knew of and then concealed the attack's zero hour from its own fighters does not undermine this conclusion. It's natural that Iran and Hezbollah left their Gazan partners to decide such details. Such compartmentalization, common in warfare, is standard security, intended to deceive Israel about the attack's timing rather than conceal the plan's existence from Iran or Hezbollah.

That neither Tehran nor the Shi'ite group joined the October 7 attack was therefore a strategic decision, one borne of their desire to preserve their strength and capabilities for their promised future regional conflict against Israel, under more advantageous conditions while Al-Aqsa Flood was launched when it was seen as an emergency measure, to hinder the looming threat of Saudi-Israeli normalization.

Further diminishing the likelihood of complete Iranian and Hezbollah ignorance, Al-Aqsa Flood's attack plans were finalized by October 2022, involving extensive intelligence-gathering and at least two years of training. It was envisioned, and unfolded, as a coordinated and disciplined assault involving not only Hamas but as training videos and shoulder patches worn by the October 7 assailants demonstrate an undertaking by the entire joint operations room of the Palestinian resistance factions.

October 7 videos show that the militant attackers from these other factions also executed familiar plans and implemented their training, rather than acting as frenzied raiders tagging on to Hamas' disciplined assault.

Critically, the inclusion of groups deeply loyal to Iran - including Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Sunni group which nevertheless subscribes to Tehran's ordering principle of Wilayat al-Faqih governance by Islamic sages - makes the notion of total Iranian ignorance even less conceivable.

Simply put, such a massive and complex undertaking could not plausibly have been kept a total secret from intimate partners like Iran and Hezbollah. While it is plausible that the operation's zero hour remained the purview of a few Hamas commanders, the methodical nature by which the attack unfolded strongly suggests that the plans must have been shared with the leadership of Hamas' partner groups in Gaza, and that their fighters would have received extensive training in executing their respective tasks. In other words, knowledge that something was afoot must have been relatively widespread. At the very least, someone-from within Hamas, or certainly PIJ would have leaked the plan's existence, especially if they believed its execution would harm Iran and its regional or Gaza-based interests.

Indeed, to the contrary, Al Aqsa Flood served converging Palestinian and Iranian interests, by derailing Israeli-Saudi normalization, returning the Palestinian cause to the center of Arab and Islamic consciousness, and hampering Israeli regional integration by, as Nasrallah stated in his November 3 speech, "reinforc- ing anew the savage and bar- baric nature of this entity, Israel." Torpedoing these efforts preserves the "Palestinian cause," quite possibly Tehran's last avenue of establishing its desired preeminence over the majority non-Persian and non-Shi'ite "Muslim world."

But this war, critical as it may be to the resistance axis, is not their planned "big regional war" against Israel. That conflict remains years off, awaiting the improvement of the resistance axis' collective and individual positions, ideally protected by an Iranian nuclear umbrella an aspirational condition to which Nasrallah hinted when he said the resistance axis was still incapable of "victory by fatal blow" against Is rael. For that, he said, "We still need time... but we are winning in increments... our battle is one of resilience and patience."

Hezbollah, in particular, would prefer not to go to war against Israel amid Lebanon's economic collapse. The battering Hezbollah will take in the war itself, coupled with postwar Lebanese ire at the group for compounding the country's economic misery with a war and the likely absence of foreign recovery aid, would leave the organization in a position of unprecedented vulnerability against domestic adversaries. Hezbollah is therefore only harassing Israel from the north impacting Israel's advance in Gaza while attempting to minimize the risk of igniting a full-scale war that could threaten Hezbollah with destruction. But in doing so, Hezbollah and Iran aren't abandoning Hamas. This is how the resistance axis wages war. Hamas and its Gazan partners deemed more capable of paying the price to halt the imminent threat posed by Saudi-Israeli normalization took the point position. Meanwhile Hezbollah, constrained by Lebanon's domestic conditions, has receded into the background to conserve its strength and resources for a future conflict or until it becomes absolutely necessary to assume a primary role in this one. Hezbollah is thus trying to preserve its assets and fighters for the future to minimize Israel's justification for tar- geting them now.

But this same sense of self-preservation is leading Hezbollah to distance itself not from Hamas per se, but to attempt to distance the concept of "resistance" from the very real possibility of an Israeli victory in Gaza. Such a setback would undermine not only their claim that "resistance" is the sole means of regaining Arab honor and land stolen by the Zionists - but their carefully crafted narrative, built over decades, that "resistance" has unfailingly resulted in consistent, gradual victories on the inexorable and inevitable path of eventually destroying Israel.

Hence Nasrallah's insistent denials of "any Israeli military accomplishment" in the current war but eventually those claims will become increasingly untenable. A demonstrably decisive Israeli victory over "the resistance" - rather than a faction that executed an independent, even rogue, action - would undermine this narrative and, with it, the basis of Hezbollah's utility to its supporters. The group's dissociation should therefore not be taken at face value, but as an attempt to preserve itself - ideologically as much as physically - and its popular appeal for the time when the conditions for the big war against Israel ripen.

David Daoud is a senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on Hezbollah, Lebanon and Israel.