ISRAEL AND HEZBOLLAH: THREAT OF CONFLAGRATION?

Gudrun Harrer in conversation with Heiko Wimmen

ISRAEL AND HEZBOLLAH: THREAT OF CONFLAGRATION?

The latest round in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has heralded a new phase in the long-running confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite militia and political party in Lebanon. For 17 years, mutual deterrence helped maintain a precarious calm, but since 7 October, rocket and drone attacks across the border have raised the spectre of a new war. On the Israeli side, it is becoming clearer that it wants to change the status quo - the presence of Hezbollah on its northern border. It is feared that attempts to impose a unilateral security regime on southern Lebanon, as Israel has done in the occupied West Bank and now in Gaza, could add fuel to the fire.

Heiko Wimmen heads the Iraq/Syria/Lebanon project at the International Crisis Group. Previously, he was a research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin. He has also worked for the Carnegie Middle East Center and MERIP and recently edited an academic anthology on elite change and new social mobilisation in the Arab world.
Wimmen has lived in the region since 1994, mainly in Beirut, where he currently resides.

Gudrun Harrer, Senior Editor, Der Standard; Lecturer for Modern History and Politics of the Near and Middle East at the University of Vienna and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna