Both President Biden’s words and his actions this week have undermined Israel’s ability to deter Hizballah, the Lebanon-based terrorist groups whose military ability far outweighs that of Hamas. Yesterday, the IDF’s home-front command announced that it would not allow the annual celebrations on Mount Meron, located five miles from the Lebanese border, which usually draw tens of thousands of devout Jews for the upcoming holiday of Lag ba-Omer.

Our essay last month focused on the origins of the threat from Hizballah and how Jerusalem might be able to deal with it. Orna Mizrahi and Yoram Schweitzer explain the current state of play, after months of near-daily exchanges of fire:

Hizballah’s modus operandi, . . . in coordination with the Iranian-led axis of resistance, demonstrates that the organization aims to maintain a restricted low-level intensity in the conflict. This strategy is meant to keep the IDF occupied on the Lebanon border. . . . Hizballah seeks to impede Israel’s efforts to achieve its stated goals in the war in the Gaza Strip and to bring it to an end.

Hizballah’s greatest accomplishment was actually the Israeli government’s decision to evacuate 43 communities along the border (around 60,000 people) during the first few days of the war, resulting in the establishment of a nearly uninhabited stretch of land in northern Israel for the first time since 1948.

At the same time, due to the IDF’s aerial superiority and active air-defense systems, as well as its strategy of preemptive attacks, Israel has inflicted more damage to Hizballah and the other factions involved in the campaign, and Israel is controlling the escalation. . . . So long as the fighting continues and there is no ceasefire, it is crucial for Israel to focus on maximizing damage to Hizballah and to attempt to change the rules of the game that it is trying to control.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.