It's now official: Hezbollah blinked after the IDF assassinated its Radwan special forces chief, Ahmad Ghaleb Balout, on May 6.
There was significant uncertainty about how the terror group would respond to the assassination of Balout, who could have been viewed in some ways as the third most important Hezbollah official who was still alive.
Since Wednesday, the IDF has repeatedly sent out public warnings about a potential major escalation of rocket fire into northern Israel.
Before Balout was assassinated, rocket fire into northern Israel had pretty much stopped for around a month, but Hezbollah did escalate by firing some rockets at the North.
Hezbollah has been firing single-digit numbers of rockets and drones toward northern Israel since the end of last week, including on Sunday multiple times throughout the day.
Hezbollah's advantages diminished
However, the volume of attacks per day pales in comparison to the around 100 rockets and drones per day which Hezbollah showered on the North in the early weeks of this war, or compared to the sometimes a couple of hundred rockets per day Hezbollah fired on Israel in the fall of 2024 (which also included ballistic missile attacks on Tel Aviv).
In that sense, Hezbollah has blinked.
Already, the IDF had held onto a larger portion of southern Lebanon after the April 17 ceasefire this time than it had taken hold of in the fall of 2024.
Moreover, the IDF said the ceasefire did not apply to Hezbollah fighters stuck in southern Lebanon.
This led the IDF to kill around 100 Hezbollah fighters in Bint Jbail despite the ceasefire.
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In addition, the IDF had maintained, even post-ceasefire, some occasional air or artillery strikes on Hezbollah targets even beyond the Litani River, which denotes southern Lebanon, if the military said that specific Hezbollah units were getting ready to potentially fire rockets on Israel.
Also, the IDF had already cleared all civilians out of southern Lebanon and Hezbollah’s Dahiyeh section of Beirut before the ceasefire, leaving around 1.1 million Lebanese, mostly Shi’ite Hezbollah supporters, either homeless or in tough situations.
But once the ceasefire started, the IDF refrained from targeting top Hezbollah officials and from striking anything in Beirut.
That was until Wednesday.
Following Hezbollah's increasing success in striking northern Israel with drones and in wounding IDF soldiers in southern Lebanon, something which continued through Sunday on almost a daily basis, Israel decided to try to up the ante with the terror group.
The Israeli hope was that killing Balout would get Hezbollah to stop attacking northern Israel, and to at least keep its attacks limited to IDF soldiers in southern Lebanon, where the military is operating anyway.
It is unclear whether that goal will be achieved.
But it was also possible that Hezbollah would treat the attack as a complete end to the ceasefire.
Instead, so far it seems the group opted for a very mild escalation.
In one sense, Hezbollah still has an upper hand, as it has continued to threaten northern Israel and, in some ways, a bit more than before.
But underneath that, Hezbollah took a major hit by Israel and responded with little more than a symbolic whisper in military terms.
So Israel has not achieved what it wanted to: a completely compliant and submissive Hezbollah in terms of rocket and drone attacks – something it has essentially achieved with Hamas in Gaza.
Yet, after six weeks in which Hezbollah seemed to regain some of its confidence by showing that it could maintain rocket fire on Israel over an extended period, Israel, in a sense, has reestablished its more dominant rules of the game.
It not only holds southern Lebanon indefinitely, but has shown it could kill one of Hezbollah’s top commanders in its capital, without facing major strategic military consequences.
There are three major reasons this seems to be happening.
One is that Hezbollah is probably down to having 10,000-15,000 rockets, has much fewer than in 2023 (when it had 150,000) or than at the start of this war (probably 20,000-30,000 rockets).
A second reason is that many of Hezbollah’s rockets were short-range, and now that the IDF has taken southern Lebanon, they simply cannot reach Israel.
Finally, a third reason is that even though Hezbollah managed to maintain a fight with Israel since early March, it has also lost over 2,000 fighters, while Israel has lost a tiny number of soldiers in strategic terms.
Many dozens of IDF soldiers have been wounded in Lebanon, but a much larger number of Hezbollah fighters have also been wounded.
Put differently, the cost to Hezbollah of continuing to fight has been astronomically higher than the cost to Israel of continuing to fight.
This is nowhere near a satisfactory situation for Israelis, but it is also strategically better than mid-March, when there were doubts about whether Israel would emerge with any advantage from the war with Hezbollah.
Whether the advantage Israel has built, along with using southern Lebanon as a bargaining chip, is enough to get Hezbollah to at least start accepting some amount of symbolic disarmament remains the central question for the future.