Strike on Hezbollah Deepens Disconnect Between Biden and Netanyahu

Israeli officials gave their American counterparts no advance warning of the strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials. But Mr. Biden said the killing was “a measure of justice” for victims of Hezbollah terrorism.

No one inside the White House was crying for Hassan Nasrallah on Saturday. But the Israeli strike that killed Mr. Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, once again deepened tensions between President Biden’s administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Israeli officials gave their American counterparts no advance warning of the strike, according to U.S. officials, who were already peeved that Mr. Netanyahu brushed off a U.S.-French 21-day cease-fire proposal. Now American officials worry that they face a wider war that could engulf the region after nearly a year of effort by Mr. Biden to head off such an escalation.

In a statement issued on Saturday morning, Mr. Biden expressed no regret over the killing of Mr. Nasrallah and noted that Hezbollah was responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over the decades. But he called on the combatants in the region “to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts” and agree to diplomatic deals to end the fighting. He also said that he had ordered U.S. forces in the region to enhance their “defense posture” to deter aggression and to reduce the risk of a broader regional war.

“His death from an Israeli airstrike is a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Nasrallah in a written statement. He noted that Mr. Nasrallah “made the fateful decision” to open a “northern front” against Israel the day after the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7.

But he emphasized the need for diplomacy to calm the region down. “In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon,” he said. “It is time for these deals to close, for the threats to Israel to be removed and for the broader Middle East region to gain greater stability.”

While the president refrained from second-guessing Israel in his statement, American officials privately expressed frustration about what they saw as the latest example of a pattern of defiance by an ally that Mr. Biden has sought to support. The miscommunications and miscalculations of recent days have only underscored the disconnect between the American president and the Israeli prime minister.

The expanding Middle East war comes at a politically sensitive time for Mr. Biden and the White House as Vice President Kamala Harris races to build support for the election that culminates in about five weeks. More turmoil in the region could fuel criticism from the left and the right even as Ms. Harris would prefer to focus attention on what she calls the dangers of another term for former President Donald J. Trump.

Some Biden team veterans even speculated about whether Mr. Netanyahu was intentionally trying to help Mr. Trump win the Nov. 5 election given their past alignment — a theory that, true or not, highlights the deep mistrust and suspicion that have grown in recent months between Washington and Jerusalem.

House Republican leaders quickly used the incident to criticize Mr. Biden for trying to restrain Israel. “We call on the Biden-Harris administration to end its counterproductive calls for a cease-fire and its ongoing diplomatic pressure campaign against Israel,” Speaker Mike Johnson and other leaders said in a statement, calling Mr. Nasrallah’s death “a major step forward for the Middle East.”

Indeed, there were some in the Biden administration who agreed with the latter assessment. Mr. Nasrallah’s death, along with Israel’s seeming success at wiping out much of Hezbollah’s war-making capacity, could present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally break the Iran-backed terrorist group’s stranglehold on Lebanon, some U.S. officials reasoned. A cease-fire deal, they hoped, could be reached now on more advantageous terms.

“Although escalatory, probably by design, it is important to note that Hezbollah has been targeting Israeli settlements since Oct. 8, the day after the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas,” said Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and retired C.I.A. officer. “No country, including the U.S., would have accepted these continuous attacks.”

On the other hand, critics of Israel said the strike was an affront to Mr. Biden and raised the dangers of further violence in the region while doing nothing to bring home the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. “This is exactly the opposite of what President Biden had been working toward as he laid out a cease-fire plan and urged a diplomatic resolution,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal Israel advocacy group.

Either way, Mr. Biden’s administration was bracing for the fallout from the strike, watching for signs that Iran might retaliate as it tried to do in April after Israel bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria. U.S. forces helped Israel knock down nearly all of the 300 missiles and drones that Iran fired at the time, thwarting Tehran’s bid for revenge, but it is not a given that they can be just as successful again.

The Israeli strike killing Mr. Nasrallah was a giant step over the red lines of Hezbollah and Iran. American officials doubt that this time Iran will be content to let fly a single barrage just to make a symbolic gesture. While it is not known exactly what Iran might be planning, a far more sustained response was considered likely, such as a multiday missile and drone attack. Still, U.S. officials said they had not yet seen preparations for such a response.

Tempering any possible Hezbollah retaliation is the fact that, at least temporarily, the group has been put on its back foot. The Israeli military campaign over the last month has not destroyed the group’s military capacity, but has most likely diminished its ability to react quickly with a decisive attack.

The Israeli overt and covert attacks have taken out Hezbollah weapons caches, disrupted their communication systems and taken out both midlevel and senior leaders. The Israeli military delivered a hard blow, one that Hezbollah will recover from eventually, but one that it will struggle to deal with in the short term, according to one U.S. official.

And past predictions of a wider war have not always born fruit. After Mr. Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian security and intelligence commander responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years, many foreign policy veterans in Washington warned that it would touch off a dangerous escalation. Instead, Iran launched a relatively modest rocket attack against U.S. bases in the region that did not kill anyone and Mr. Trump then stood down, ending the immediate conflict.

At the same time, predictions that killing General Suleimani would deter future Iranian support for terrorism likewise did not turn out to be right either. Iran continues to back not only Hezbollah but Hamas, the Houthis and other militias in Iraq and Syria. And according to U.S. prosecutors, Iran has been trying to find ways to assassinate Mr. Trump and other members of his administration ever since.

Mr. Nasrallah has played a singular role in Lebanon for decades. U.S. officials have argued over the last year that he actually has been a moderating force on Hezbollah, on Iran and the region. Like the White House, they said, Mr. Nasrallah did not want a wider war. In his case, he believed it would undermine Hezbollah’s position in Lebanon and bring the kind of devastation that Palestinians in Gaza have suffered.

Mr. Nasrallah did not know about Hamas’s plans for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, U.S. officials said, and almost certainly would have objected to them. While he did have Hezbollah conduct cross-border rocket strikes, driving Israelis from their homes in northern Israel, he did not let the conflict escalate further. U.S. officials understood the political problems those cross-border attacks were causing in Israel, but believed that the only way to get Hezbollah to stop was to get a peace agreement in Gaza.

But with Mr. Netanyahu unwilling to make a cease-fire agreement with Hamas, some military officials in Israel clearly thought an escalatory attack on Hezbollah was the only way to stop the cross-border strikes. Even after Israel’s strike on a Hezbollah missile factory in Syria and its recent exploding pager attack on Hezbollah military leaders, U.S. and French officials held out hope that they could find an offramp.

After a series of texts between Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, and other U.S. officials with Ron Dermer, a top adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, the White House thought Israel would be open to a 21-day cease-fire proposed by the United States and France. But soon after Washington and Paris announced the plan, Mr. Netanyahu rejected it out of hand.

People close to the Israeli side blamed that on a miscommunication, not an intentional effort to snub Mr. Biden. They said the proposal never made it to Mr. Netanyahu himself nor was it taken to the security cabinet and therefore was never something Israel had signaled it was ready to accept. U.S. officials expressed skepticism about that explanation, but the episode embarrassed and angered Mr. Biden and his team.

For their part, the Israelis did not notify much less ask for permission to go after Mr. Nasrallah, a decision American officials assumed was because the Israelis knew the U.S. side would object out of concern that such a move was counterproductive.

Instead, Mr. Biden appeared out of the loop. Asked on Friday about strikes that targeted Mr. Nasrallah, he told reporters that he needed to “get more detail” and did not “know enough to answer that question.”

Asked if he was concerned about escalation, he said simply: “I’m always concerned about that. I’m always concerned about that.”

Michael Crowley, Edward Wong and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.