A day after a top commander of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah was assassinated, the group vowed to retaliate against Israel, but more than two weeks later, the response has yet to come, as Hezbollah seeks a delicate balance between the revenge it seeks and the risks of a domestic backlash, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Lebanon is already mired in deep turmoil due to a political and economic crisis that has lasted for years, and its citizens are tired of conflict. “The country has slid from one crisis to another since the 15-year civil war broke out in 1975. If Hezbollah ends up in another brutal war with Israel now, the nation could turn against it,” the report said.

The Lebanese state is made up of many factions and sects, and has been under the control of an ineffective transitional government for years. “Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite group, is part of that coalition government and is the real force holding Lebanon together. As the dominant political and military force in the entire country, Hezbollah has everything to lose and knows it must tread carefully,” the report said.

The group has consolidated its position over the past three decades, forcing Israel to withdraw from Lebanon after 18 years and outmaneuvering its domestic enemies in a political system that divides power by sect. It has amassed a large and powerful arsenal, more powerful than the national army. It controls or oversees the country’s most important infrastructure. And it has elevated its constituency in the process, empowering Lebanon’s Shiites, a historically marginalized community, enriching them and providing them with services.

“Many citizens in Lebanon now benefit from a wealth of services run by Hezbollah, including good health care, free education, and even a Boy Scout program. Meanwhile, the broken and bankrupt Lebanese state struggles to provide even the most basic services, like electricity, to all its citizens. No other political party has the money or organization to provide for its own community’s needs like Hezbollah,” the report said.

Hezbollah must balance its loyalty to Iran and the Palestinian cause with the tolerance, if not support, of the Lebanese people. If the group miscalculates in its retaliatory measures, Israel has vowed a response that could devastate Lebanon once again, the paper says. “Hezbollah is stuck in a quandary,” Alain Aoun, a Christian member of the Lebanese parliament allied with Hezbollah, was quoted as saying. “They have to avenge the assassination of their leader, but the taste of 2006 is still in their mouths. They know that the Lebanese people can no longer take this.”

In 2006, Hezbollah and Israel fought a bloody month-long war that devastated large swaths of southern Lebanon. Israel’s brutal response rallied many Lebanese factions around Hezbollah. But the danger now is that many in the country may blame the militants for any further destruction rather than rally behind them.

Hezbollah has already been engaged in a low-level war with Israel for the past 10 months in support of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on October 7, sparking the war in Gaza.

Analysts say Israel and Hezbollah have carefully calibrated their attacks on each other so as not to provoke all-out war. But there is always the risk that a single mistake or miscalculation could push one side over the edge.

“These risks were heightened late last month when a rocket from Lebanon struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 teenagers and children. Hezbollah denied that the rocket was its manufacture, while US and Israeli assessments concluded that the rocket belonged to the group,” the newspaper claims.

Israel retaliated in Beirut by assassinating Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr - a blow to the Lebanese capital that was seen as a potentially dangerous escalation.

This assassination came one day before the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of Hamas, in Tehran, the Iranian capital.

The newspaper notes that Western and Middle Eastern governments are eagerly awaiting how and when Hezbollah and Iran might respond, while American and Arab mediators have redoubled their efforts this week to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the hope that this will lead to calming regional tensions.

There is, in fact, a fear that any response that comes after could turn into a regional war that is even more intense, intractable and widespread than it is now. The most important question is not when Hezbollah will respond but how. Analysts say the militants believe that any attack on Israel would have to be strong enough to force Israel to reconsider striking Beirut again, but not so strong that it would lead to a devastating response against Lebanon.

The newspaper quotes Amal Saad, a lecturer at Cardiff University and a prominent researcher on Hezbollah: “Hezbollah must respond forcefully to extend Israeli red lines but without crossing the threshold that would lead to a full-scale war.”

Hezbollah showed last June that it may have the intelligence and military capabilities to penetrate deep into Israel, when it released drone images of sensitive installations, including an air base, in and around Haifa.

In contrast to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has a much larger and more powerful arsenal at stake — tens of thousands of rockets, precision-guided missiles that can hit towns and cities in Israel.

“I am not saying that the goal of this battle is to eliminate Israel, but the goal of this battle is to prevent Israel from winning” and “to eliminate the Palestinian resistance,” Mr. Nasrallah said, softening his usual approach of calling for the annihilation of Israel, a long-standing goal of Hezbollah.

Mr. Nasrallah said Hezbollah could respond independently of Iran, underscoring his group’s ability to act independently of its patron. He also said forcing Israel to wait for a response was part of the group’s psychological warfare.

The attack that killed Mr. Shukr last month in Dahiyeh, a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs that was completely destroyed during the 2006 war, was the latest high-intensity conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel has also hit critical national infrastructure.

The newspaper notes that Mr. Nasrallah said in 2006 that he would not have ordered the capture of two Israeli soldiers - the incident that sparked the conflict - if he had known it would lead to such a war.

In subsequent years, oil-rich Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia spent billions of dollars rebuilding Lebanon. But if a full-scale war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah now, the Gulf is unlikely to help rebuild Lebanon on the scale they did then.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in a decades-long war of influence across the Middle East, with Lebanon often the starting point. Iran-backed Hezbollah ultimately prevailed over the Saudis’ Lebanese allies about a decade ago. For these reasons, it is unlikely to enjoy strong Gulf support this time around, even if tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have eased recently.

By the time the latest war in the region broke out, Lebanon was already severely weakened by years of political paralysis and economic decline.

Its economy collapsed in 2019, with the currency losing more than 95 percent of its value, wiping out the savings of many. The crisis led to a political collapse, and the caretaker government that was formed in early 2020 was too broke to provide basic services to the country.

For all these reasons and more, most Lebanese have no appetite for another major war with neighboring Israel.