Two fronts - and they just eliminated (maybe just temporarily) the paramilitary / authoritarian group within a state which another state is using as a proxy. This allows a focus back south. With the chaos that they caused within Hezbollah (not Hamas), they may not have to invade. Making the situation a one front issue is pretty strategic.
I don't know why you are bolding Hezbollah. I used the word Hamas in my prior post because the primary conflict is between them and Israel, with Hezbollah supporting Hamas and the U.S. supporting Israel. That was the basis of using
Hamas in my example of attacking American military and political leadership. There is a separate, protracted conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, but the two need to be analyzed separately.
I disagree with your assertion here that Israel's actions have consolidated their front against Lebanon. Implicit in this contention is that the Hezbollah leadership represents their theater-strategic center of gravity, which a C2 structure rarely does. The only way this helps Israel achieve its aims is if the change in leadership will result in a favorable shift in Lebanon's national policy - extremely unlikely in this case given Hezbollah's popular support (the political party, not the individuals). The other case where this helps is if Israel thinks it can defeat Hamas in the time it will take Hezbollah's leadership to reorganize - I also think that's completely unrealistic.
I think that the operation will have the opposite effect - it's going to strengthen Hezbollah's morale to fight against Israel and ramp up their aggressiveness in attacking them, creating an increasing distraction against their fight against Hamas. In other words, it's going to widen the two-front conflict rather than consolidate it. Meanwhile, popular support for Israel in the U.S. continues to decrease, making support cost increasing political capital - a fact the Biden administration is acutely aware of.
There may have been some alternative intel that motivated the cell-phone strike, but if that's the case I go back to my statement that Israel has a gross IO failure following the operation.
The only way for Israel to capitalize on the short-term gains to Hezbollah's degraded leadership is to take military action in southern Lebanon to defeat them before they can reorganize. Besides the fact that Israel lacks the military capability to do this without U.S. support that we aren't willing to give at this time, that option would significantly degrade Israel's legitimacy among other nations.
Biden did condemn Nasrallah, but he has also been steadfast about an i
nternationally approved ceasefire plan that has been unpalatable to Netanyahu. Our primary policy goal is deescalation.
We assassinated Soleimani under a different administration with different policy goals. It also turned a lot of heads at the time. I already said a couple posts ago that Netanyahu's gambit would payoff with a Trump re-election.
None of this is an endoresement of Hezbollah or Hamas being the "good guys" like the idiots protesting on college campuses. They are, unequivocally, at odds with U.S. national security and present a threat to our families. But just like we can't off Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, Putin, or whoever, Israel can't off Hezbollah's leadership and "win." Closer to home, we can't execute a bunch of prominent cartel leaders in South America and celebrate a win against illegal immigration, fentanyl, and cocaine. It's not that simple, even if it was fucking cool that Israel wiped out senior leaders in a matter of a couple of days. In this context, we have to divorce ourselves from the emotional "hell yeah, they killed bad guys" from how to best achieve political objectives and end-states.
