Israel flagged Hezbollah threat before launching air attacks, leaked memo shows
US embassy cable said Israeli officials did not trust Lebanon or Syria to contain the group’s fighters
An internal US assessment indicates that Israeli officials had doubts that the Lebanese state could disarm Hezbollah even before Israel launched an aerial campaign against the group on Monday.
The leaked embassy cable shows that on the eve of the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Israeli officials had told Washington that Hezbollah was reconstituting its military capabilities faster than the Lebanese armed forces could degrade them. It said neither Beirut nor Damascus could be trusted to contain the threat on Israel’s northern borders.
The 27 February cable, seen by the Guardian, was sent to Washington a day before Israel and the US launched their aerial campaign against Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and prompting Tehran to launch retaliatory strikes across the region.
Three days after the US cable was sent, Israel launched the first of a wave of airstrikes against Hezbollah-dominated areas in southern Beirut.
The cable indicated that Israel doubted Syria’s new leaders could control their own security forces and was “gravely” alarmed by Turkish military entrenchment in Syria, which it warned could create a strategic threat to Israel’s north. It also claimed that Turkish officials had “repeatedly incited against Israel in Syria” even while Israeli and Turkish national security officials maintained “de-confliction” agreements. The cable said this suggested Ankara was pursuing a dual track – managing relations with Tel Aviv privately while positioning itself militarily in Syria at Israel’s expense.
The cable was intended as a background briefing for the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, before a trip to Israel that was later cancelled.
It was written under the auspices of the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. A self-avowed Christian Zionist, Huckabee had days earlier told the US journalist Tucker Carlson it would be “fine” if Israel seized territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The remarks triggered a diplomatic scandal and condemnation from 14 governments, prompting the embassy to say “US policy has not changed”.
Huckabee also told Carlson that if Israel “ended up getting attacked by all these places and they win that war and they take that land, OK, that’s a whole other discussion”.
The embassy cable said Israeli officials had lost confidence in the Lebanese state ever moving against Hezbollah. Israel, according to the internal report, “harbours major doubts Hezbollah will agree to give up its weapons” and questions the Lebanese government’s “commitment to confront Hezbollah to take control of all Lebanese territory”.
Iranian funding was still reaching the group “through Turkey and elsewhere”, the cable said, despite the November 2024 ceasefire. The Israel Defense Forces, the cable added, had already been forced “to pick up military attacks on Hezbollah as a result”.
The Lebanese army announced in January that it had taken over security in southern Lebanon – a move Israel greeted with scepticism. The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said efforts toward fully disarming Hezbollah were “an encouraging beginning, but they are far from sufficient, as evidenced by Hezbollah’s efforts to rearm and rebuild its terror infrastructure with Iranian support”.
The ceasefire, brokered after months of cross-border exchanges, was already under strain before the Iran strikes began, with Israeli forces maintaining five military outposts north of a UN-demarcated blue line inside Lebanese territory.
On Syria, Israeli officials told embassy staff they doubted its president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had the “ability and willingness to control his security forces”. They expressed what the internal report called “grave” concern over Turkish military entrenchment, warning it could “create a strategic threat to Israel”.
Israel has maintained a military presence in the UN buffer zone separating Israel and Syria since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, a move widely condemned internationally but which Israel insists is a defensive necessity.
The cable was sent the day before US and Israeli strikes on Iran began. Within 72 hours, Hezbollah had fired rockets into northern Israel for the first time since the 2024 ceasefire, Israel had bombed Beirut and Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, had convened an emergency cabinet meeting demanding that Hezbollah disarm.
In January, Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, showed little sign he would heed that call, saying that any attack on Tehran was an attack on Hezbollah.
