“حملة إسرائيل ‘بين الحروب’: كيف أن استراتيجية احتواء إيران وحلفائها تهدد بزيادة توتر علاقاتها بالولايات المتحدة.”

A lot hangs on whether the United States can compel Israel to cease operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. After all, an end to the Israeli military offensive was a key provision of the broad U.S.-Iran agreement setting out a road map to end the Iran war.

And even though Israel did not sign the deal, policymakers in Washington will continue to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abide by the truce.

Yet there’s a larger and more vexing issue for the Trump administration and its Arab allies in the Middle East that has received little attention: Israel’s long-standing “campaign between the wars” strategy and whether it threatens the prospect for long-term peace in the region.

The policy, known as “Mivtsa Bein Milchamot” in Hebrew and shortened to “Mabam,” has become a widely accepted facet of Israel’s national security. Its purpose is to degrade the capabilities of Iran and its key regional allies in any interwar period.

As the former assistant director of CIA for Weapons and Counterproliferation, I have watched Israel wage Mabam in an increasingly bold manner and widening geographic scope over the past seven years. Israel has broadened both the targets of the strategy and the instruments it uses to strike them, heightening the risk of escalation.

Save any unexpected abandonment of the policy, Israel will almost certainly continue launching limited military strikes, covert action and cyberattacks across the Middle East, regardless of any U.S. deal with Iran. This will likely take the form of degrading the capabilities of Iran’s partner Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Shiite militants in Iraq and even Tehran’s unreliable ally the Houthis in Yemen. And Israel will remain willing to take military actions short of full-scale war in Iran itself.

But such outcomes will pose serious challenges for the U.S., which seems intent on avoiding a renewed war with Tehran. In fact, Israel’s “campaign between the wars” risks widening the split with Washington and restarting war with Iran and its allies over the long term.

Origins of Mabam

Israel codified the Mabam strategy in a 2015 Israeli Defense Forces document. Its history, however, predates the official adoption of the policy, with the IDF executing “campaign between the wars” operations in the early 2010s.

Most scholars and Israeli military officials acknowledge that the strategy evolved from cross-border “reprisal operations” against Jordan, Egypt, Syria and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon in the 1950s and’60s.

The logic behind Mabam is that by using targeted operations to consistently downgrade the capabilities of Iran and its allies, Israel will be better prepared for future wars by maintaining a qualitative military advantage. Israel’s goal is to avoid escalation by taking actions that it judges Iran and its proxies will view as below the threshold for significant retaliation.

As the former chief of the Israeli general staff and architect of Mabam, Lt. Gen Gadi Eisenkot, explained in 2019: “Deviating from the binary approach of either preparing for war or openly waging it, the [campaign between the wars policy] strives for proactive, offensive actions based on extremely high-quality intelligence and clandestine efforts.”

Expanding beyond Syria

In the early 2010s, the Israeli military focused Mabam on Hezbollah in Syria, where the group lacked the advanced military capabilities it possessed in Lebanon and therefore posed a less significant risk of escalation.

Jerusalem placed a premium on degrading Hezbollah’s advanced weapons, supplied by its ally and sponsor Iran, and “preventing the entrenchment of terror infrastructures on the Golan Heights border,” in the words of Israeli military strategist Eran Ortal.

To achieve this, Israel employed airstrikes, cyberattacks, interdictions of weapons and covert action to impede Iran’s ability to resupply Hezbollah’s existing arsenal and supply it with more advanced weapons. Israel’s targets included Iranian facilities and missile warehouses in Syria, convoys and shipments of weapons, and Hezbollah and Islamic Revolutionary Guard personnel in Syria.

Later in the decade, Israel broadened its objectives to include pressuring the Assad regime in Syria and undercutting the long-standing Iranian-Syrian relationship.

Encouraged by the success of its strategy in Syria, Israel began to take action against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Lebanon as well.

In summer 2019, Israel reportedly struck the weapons depots of Iranian-back Shiite militant groups in Iraq. Explosive-laden drones that experts trace to Israel targeted equipment linked to Hezbollah’s precision-guided missile program.

With these actions, Israel almost certainly delayed and degraded some adversary capabilities, especially those of Hezbollah. In particular, it stopped or delayed Iranian transfers of precision-guided missiles and the guidance kits that Hezbollah could use to enable such capability, limiting the size of the Lebanese group’s arsenal.

An imperfect strategy

However, the size and capabilities of Hezbollah’s missile and rocket force show the limits of Israeli effectiveness. The group possessed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 missiles and rockets prior to the resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in 2026. Israeli officials and pro-Israeli think tanks would make the counterfactual argument that Hezbollah’s arsenal, especially of advanced weapons, would have been much larger without Mabam operations.

Israeli officials refrain from directly connecting the country’s covert action in Iran since the late 2010s to Mabam. But explosions at nuclear, missile and drone facilities and assassinations of scientists outside the direct conflicts of June 2025 and from February 2026 clearly map to the goal of degrading Iranian military capabilities in between wars.

To use one prominent example, an explosion in July 2020 widely linked to Israel disabled a key Iranian advanced centrifuge assembly facility, destroying more than half of the facility.

But the attack had unexpected consequences. Iran was able to rebuild the capability in a matter of months, concentrating on locating future centrifuge assembly capabilities at sites buried deep underground.

A risk to US objectives

In an early 2026 graduation speech for military cadets, Netanyahu declared that Israel would move beyond Mabam to even more actively confront threats. “There is no more containment of threats. There is no more Mabam,” he said after decades of supporting the strategy.

But even a force that conducts a high number of military operations like the IDF needs a strategy short of full-scale war.

And since most in the Israeli security establishment view the Mabam strategy as generally successful in diminishing Iran’s capabilities and those of its partners and proxies, it will likely remain a prominent feature of Israeli strategy even if updated to reflect current perceived threats. This will be the case whether Israel is led by Netanyahu or another leader.

While a central aspect of Mabam is avoiding escalation, this balancing act will be increasingly difficult in today’s Middle East.

To retain U.S. support for Israel’s overall Iran strategy, expanded coordination with Washington will be crucial. Israel has sometimes, but not always, coordinated relevant actions with the U.S. For instance, it allowed the U.S. Central Command to review strikes it planned to launch from near the Al Tanf Base in Syria that hosted U.S. troops until February 2026.

Israel believes it has valid reasons for sometimes conducting military action on its own: Israeli officials view Iran developing a nuclear weapon as an “existential” threat and Hezbollah having a large arsenal of precision-guided missiles as a “strategic threat” to the state of Israel.

However, Washington is likely to ask for wider coordination with Israel in the aftermath of the Iran war. That war ever more tightly connected U.S. security interests to those of Israel, but the ongoing negotiations to end the conflict have shown a rare degree of distance between the two countries. Coordinating its operations short of war will be a bitter pill for Israeli leaders intent on acting as they desire. It also has the potential to further strain Israel-U.S. relations in the years ahead.

This article reflects the views of the author and not the US Government.