“There is no clear support for Hezbollah in the region today,” says Frédéric Encel.

The doctor of geopolitics judges that, as things stand, there is no reason to fear a regional conflagration following Israel’s strikes in Lebanon targeting members of Hezbollah. Frédéric Encel points out that Iran, for example, has not yet shown any reaction.

Another day under Israeli bombs in Lebanon. The death toll continues to rise with nearly 500 dead now. Israel says it has struck more than a thousand targets linked to Hezbollah, raising concerns among the UN Secretary General and the world, who fear that the region will erupt in flames. “We are on the brink of total war“, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, was alarmed. But in the eyes of Frédéric Encel, doctor of geopolitics and lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, this concern is not really justified for the moment.

franceinfo: The international community is worried about a conflagration in the region. Should we really fear it?

Frederic Encel: No more than usual. Quantitatively, we are on more than in recent months. But that said, since the low-intensity war started by Hezbollah in support of Hamas, on October 8, 9, 10, this “squabble” in quotation marks, which is already quite deadly, has prevailed daily. There is not, qualitatively, anything new in that there is precisely no regional conflagration. We are indeed on a rise once again in the strike force between the two belligerents.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran, which created Hezbollah from scratch in 1982 and is its great mentor, is not reacting at all.”

Frédéric Encel, doctor in geopolitics

on franceinfo

There is no clear, concrete support for Hezbollah in the region today.

Is Israel not taking the risk of opening a new front while the one in Gaza is not finished?

It is not finished, but almost. That is to say that the Israeli population is still very marked, very shocked, by the fact that a little more than 50, perhaps 60 hostages, remain in the hands of Hamas. But fundamentally, the ballistic capabilities of this Islamist movement are almost destroyed. Today, there is no longer any possibility for Hamas to supply itself under the famous Philadelphia axis, therefore on the Egyptian border, and obviously neither by sea, nor by air, nor even to strike Israel. So it is a front, but which for the Israelis – from a military point of view and not a moral one – has become secondary and which is now almost frozen.

On the other hand, Hezbollah poses a much greater threat to Israel. And as we can see, Hezbollah members are more numerous, better trained, better trained and have much larger missiles to strike Israel than Hamas had.

Can Israel hope to defeat Hezbollah?

No, not at all. On the military level, Hezbollah is not reducible, and this for two reasons. First, because it will continue to be supplied by Iran – even if Iran does not intervene directly in its favor – via Iraq and Syria. Moreover, this is the reason why the Israelis regularly bomb roads and airfields, precisely in Syria. Geography is primarily used to wage war. So there, Hezbollah’s geography is quite favorable to it. There is significant strategic depth.

And on the other hand, it is not reducible because Hezbollah is not just a military or terrorist group. It is also a Lebanese political party that represents a large part of the Shiites who, themselves, constitute the largest minority, about 30-35% of the population. It is also a group that does social work, that does educational work, that is religious and spiritual, etc.

“On the other hand, what Israel is trying to do is to re-impose its deterrent credibility. That is ultimately what Israel has been seeking since October 7.”

Frederic Encel

to franceinfo

And because Hezbollah is the jellyfish?

Yes. Not only is it an extremely important movement that is actually part of several dimensions, in several regions of Lebanon. There is also South Beirut, the large neighborhood of Chiyah… Hezbollah helped save Bashar al-Assad at the time of the Arab Spring and the terrible civil war in this country… So, you have a great depth of field and a kind of multipolarity in a way of this movement that does not make it destructible.