News & Comment

The 2006 conflict was sparked by a Hezbollah ambush on Israeli territory, which left three soldiers dead and two abducted. After the 34-day war was concluded, Nasrallah publicly admitted he’d misread Israel, saying he wouldn’t have ordered the capture of the Israeli soldiers had he known it would trigger full-blown war. “If I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.” He misunderstood Israel this time too, as the Hamas attacks made Israelis even less tolerant of the Hezbollah threat — their patience “dropped to nearly zero in the wake of the October 2023 attacks,” said Matthew Savill of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “The Israeli threshold for pain is higher” now than during the last clash, they’re willing to withstand more.

Dan Marks, energy security researcher at defence think-tank the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), predicted that energy prices would likely remain stable in the short term because “supply and demand fundamentals seem to be much more influential at the moment than geopolitics”.