If Israel and Hezbollah wanted an all-out war, it would have happened long ago. Both sides would welcome the destruction of the other, but the time is clearly not ripe for either side to engage in a full-scale conflict.

The hostilities on the Israel-Lebanon border on Sunday morning provided further evidence of this underlying reality.

In terms of munitions expended, it was the largest confrontation in months. Israel deployed 100 fighter jets and hit more than 40 locations with rockets, but killed only one person and wounded four more, according to Sunday afternoon’s count.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) clearly paid far more attention to civilian casualties in Lebanon than in Gaza. While Israel insists it will continue fighting until Hamas is completely wiped out, Foreign Minister Israel Katz stressed Sunday that his government has no interest in such an existential struggle with Hezbollah.

According to its own version of events, Hezbollah launched 320 rockets and a large number of drones on Sunday morning, but caused only a handful of injuries. The Lebanese Shiite militia nevertheless claimed to have achieved its goal of taking revenge for a commander killed by Israel last month. Its spokesman stretched credibility by claiming that its plans had not been affected in any way by the earlier Israeli airstrikes, but the purpose of the message was clear: to draw a line under the day’s hostilities and ease the pressure on Hezbollah to keep the fight going.

Both sides have compelling reasons not to go to war now. Israel lacks the energy for a new front, while it has yet to fully defeat Hamas in Gaza, and the West Bank is being pushed to the brink of a broader explosion of violence by hardline settlers and their supporters within the Israeli state.

IDF commanders are also aware that a war with Hezbollah cannot be won without a ground invasion, which would cost the lives of many Israeli soldiers. Despite recent upgrades, Israeli tanks are still considered highly vulnerable to ambushes.

Hezbollah’s leadership, for its part, has assets to protect in Lebanon, political and economic, that would be destroyed in a war with Israel. The group’s regional patron, Iran, is also clearly not ready for conflict, having postponed its own threatening response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month.

Hezbollah and Iran do not have the same apocalyptic self-destructive impulses as Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander in Gaza. Sinwar launched his surprise attack on Israel on October 7, wrongly assuming that his allies in Beirut and Tehran would join the fight.

Just because neither Israel nor Hezbollah wants war now doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Both sides use very primitive means – mainly explosives – to send messages to each other, and the potential for miscalculation is always high.

According to reports, the Israeli army was about to wage war in Lebanon immediately after October 7. The reason for this was that Hezbollah was involved in the attack and its fighters were about to cross the northern border.

The potential for unintended consequences was also high on Sunday. If the IDF’s account of events was accurate, its warplanes blew up dozens of launch pads and foiled planned Hezbollah rocket attacks on strategic targets in central Israel. If one of those rockets had hit a major city and caused significant casualties, the political pressure on Netanyahu’s government to push Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon could easily have become irresistible.

The potential for error is probably greatest when each side tries to guess the other’s internal political dynamics. For example, when Israel killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in southern Beirut last month, there was no way to know how many rockets or missiles Hezbollah considered sufficient to avenge him, or where to aim them.

Likewise, while driving more than 80,000 Israelis from their homes with its cross-border bombardments, Hezbollah could not possibly have anticipated the political pressure it would put on Netanyahu’s coalition to take over southern Lebanon and allow the displaced residents to return. Public support for an invasion is already considerable, and the Israeli prime minister has his own reasons for keeping his country at war and delaying new elections.

Amid this mutual recklessness, the US is desperately trying to limit the risk. The Biden administration’s primary goal since October 7 – and its primary achievement, US officials say – has been to prevent the war in Gaza from becoming a regional conflagration.

Washington has urged restraint from its friends while moving troops into the region to deter its enemies. The central strategy—or at least the essential hope—is that a hostages-for-peace deal in Gaza would also defuse the worsening confrontation on Israel’s northern border.

Talks continue this week, and U.S. briefers continue to insist, despite recent experience to the contrary, that a deal is within reach. But there are serious doubts about whether Netanyahu or Sinwar really want an end to the fighting. War can break out without either side wanting it, but the same cannot be said about peace.