Counting the cost of Israel and Hezbollah's war with no winners

The war escalated with Israel's ground invasion on September 30 but the outcome is far from clear after weeks of devastation

Rescuers search the rubble of a building following an Israeli airstrike on Beirut, Lebanon, 26 November 2024. EPA

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The war in Lebanon has raged for more than a year after Hezbollah intervened in Israel’s war on Gaza on October 8, 2023. The violence has left a trail of devastation and displacement in both countries, but especially in Lebanon, where 3,768 people had been killed by Tuesday, including around 250 children, with villages wiped off the map.

One strike on Saturday in Beirut killed at least 83 and injured hundreds. Overall, nearly 13,500 people have been injured in Lebanon. And while Israel’s strikes have ostensibly targeted Hezbollah, civil defence personnel have been killed – 21 in two strikes this month – along with 40 Lebanese soldiers, despite the country’s regular army staying on the sidelines of the war.

The sum total of loss points to a conflict that is likely to end inconclusively, despite significant damage to Hezbollah – a war with no winners.

On the Israeli side, a steady stream of Hezbollah rocket, drone and missile volleys has killed nearly 50 civilians including foreign workers and in one strike in July, 12 Druze children in the occupied Golan Heights.

According to the Israeli military, Hezbollah has fired more than 16,000 rockets, leading to the displacement of over 65,000 people from northern Israel. Ninety Israeli soldiers have also been killed in action, about half since their invasion on September 30, suggesting the number of wounded is in the hundreds.

Economic damage

Economically, both sides have been hit hard as tourists and investors kept away in fear of the violence, while displaced people – 1.2 million in Lebanon – have been unable to work, putting immense strain on the aid-dependent government. The displaced in Lebanon are thought by the UN to need $250 million per month in assistance, or around $3 billion per year.

For comparison, by the third quarter of 2023, when the war began, Lebanon had received around $1 billion in aid from international donors, according to Blom Bank.

Lebanon has suffered other crushing blows, with financial and material losses amounting to 10 per cent of GDP or higher. In mid-November, the World Bank said damage to the already crisis-hit country was $8.5 billion.

Lebanon had already seen its GDP plummet in an economic crash widely blamed on political corruption and mismanagement in 2018, from around $55 billion that year to $20 billion after Covid-19 and, according to Statistica, recovering to around $24 billion before the war. It was already described by the World Bank as one of the sharpest economic contractions in history.

Now the country faces an added reconstruction challenge after the UN warned in late September that more than 23,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed, a figure likely to be much higher now.

The Israeli government’s most recent estimate of damage to the northern border area, including damage to homes and businesses, amounted to $1.35 billion in losses.

But the cost of keeping tens of thousands of soldiers mobilised – many of them reservists, including 40,000 in the Lebanon invasion and tens of thousands more in the Northern Command on high alert – probably runs into billions, including operational costs for equipment and defensive systems such as Iron Dome, which shoots down rockets and drones at $100,000 per interception.

Military balance

Israel’s finance ministry estimated the cost of keeping reservists ready could reach $1.36 billion this year. Early in the Gaza war, Israel’s finance ministry said operations were costing $246 million a day. The intensity of fighting in Lebanon, including air and ground operations, is greater.

Israeli commanders undoubtedly believe this – and hundreds of casualties – is worth the cost to reduce further economic damage and loss of life, by uprooting Hezbollah’s arsenal. US military support since October 7 – over $22 billion according to the Costs of War project at Brown University in the US – enabled Israel to sustain these operations.

But for how long? The Bank of Israel has tallied drops in investment in multiple sectors that could wipe 10 per cent off GDP.

This leaves an assessment on the military front which The National previously discussed would be hard to evaluate until fighting ends, as both sides are withholding or deliberately obscuring events on the ground.

A picture is emerging however: one of hard fighting for hilltops, towns and villages in the undulating countryside of south Lebanon. Hezbollah has mounted hundreds of hit-and-run attacks, with videos of operations showing anti-tank guided missiles and quadcopter drones flying into Israeli infantry positions and vehicles, inflicting casualties.

Israel has been able to strike back rapidly using a system called Fireweaver, which connects drone cameras, infantry commanders and sensors on vehicles to quickly point out enemy targets and call on the nearest available weapon. This and a bigger air force with more drones and more heavily protected vehicles is likely to have resulted in fewer Israeli military deaths than in the 33-day 2006 war, when 121 Israeli soldiers died.

But Hezbollah has also stood and fought like a regular army in battles such as for Khiam, despite Israel's massive firepower advantage.

South Lebanon has proven, as it did in 2006, an ideal place to mount ambushes, which can negate advantages such as air power, reducing combat to a “who shoots first” contest. Eight soldiers were killed, including six elite Golani commandos, in one ambush and a separate mortar attack on October 3.

Despite this, Hezbollah has also suffered massive casualties in the fighting, alongside the horrific civilian toll, with some estimates putting their fatalities over 1,500. Many of their commanders and weapons specialists have been killed in hundreds of strikes, including in Syria.

The group has endure, however, keeping up a steady stream of around 100 rockets per day fired at Israel, and in some cases powerful short-range ballistic missiles, spiking at more than 320 rockets in one day this month.

But this is still a fraction of the estimated 1,000 per day they were expected to fire in the event of full-scale war, which erupted with Israel’s September 30 ground invasion.