Israel and Hezbollah have reached the point of sheer, blatant inanity.

On Sunday, the IDF dispatched dozens of warplanes for an “extensive” preemptive strike on southern Lebanon, where Hassan Nasrallah’s army was preparing to fire a massive barrage of missiles and rockets into Israel.

Apparently, Hezbollah had “thousands” of launchers at the ready. The IDF acted in “self-defense to remove the threats,” as Daniel Hagari put it. During that “removal” process, Hezbollah lobbed scores of projectiles over the border. The vast majority were intercepted by Israel’s defenses amid the all-too-familiar blaring of air raid sirens.

Hezbollah was responding to the late-July assassination of Fuad Shukr. Shukr was a big name. As a young man, he helped plan the infamous 1983 attack on US military personnel in Beirut, where 220 Marines were killed on October 23, 1983. Israel killed Shukr in retaliation for a tragic incident in Majdal Shams, where Hezbollah accidentally killed a dozen Druze Arab children playing soccer while trying to hit — I don’t know, something other than a youth soccer field.

Yoav Gallant briefly put the country in a state of emergency on Sunday, where that meant Israelis were supposed to limit large gatherings. Because, as it turns out, gathering in huge numbers on disputed territory surrounded by fanatics is dangerous.

The emergency order didn’t last all that long, and after a brief service disruption, Ben-Gurion airport was reopened. Hezbollah later explained, calmly, that it had to fire rockets at a dozen military bases in Israel’s north to give the attack drones it launched the best chance of making it to their targets. (Well, when you put it that way!)

The attack (Hezbollah’s) was ineffectual. One Israeli soldier died because something fell on him. Other than that, this was a giant waste of time and resources for the group, but also for the IDF, which burned up Yahweh only knows how many American tax dollars to put on a live-fire light show.

Six hours after the melee began, Israel lifted the state of emergency. Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his standing threat: “Whoever harms us, we will harm them,” he said, in a statement. Around the same time, Hezbollah released a statement of its own. “[Our] military operations are finished for the day,” it read.

Again, this has an unmistakable air of farce to it. Deadly farce, sure, but farce all the same. Nothing — certainly nothing righteous and really nothing nefarious either, if that’s what Nasrallah’s going for —  is being accomplished here. This is just shooting for the sake of it.

As noted in the linked article above, Iran and Hezbollah aren’t capable of “an eye for an eye” in the presence of losses like those they’re now suffering on a regular basis. Were Hezbollah to assassinate an Israeli government official or military figure comparable to Shukr’s stature in the group, Israel would raze their strongholds in Beirut, and maybe even the whole city. Then the IDF would invade. Maybe it’d be another draw in the end (i.e., maybe Hezbollah would fight them to a standstill again) but the point is, Israel can assassinate top Hezbollah figures at will and all Nasrallah can do is fire rockets.

The same’s generally true of Iran: They have no recourse in the face of strategic embarrassment other than missile and drone volleys. The fact that Mossad was able to infiltrate the IRGC in the course of planting an explosive in Ismail Haniyeh‘s heavily-guarded Tehran pied-à-terre, was yet another reminder that this fight is so far from fair — Israel’s intelligence and military superiority is so vast — that Iran would do well to just give it up. If the definition of “win” is truly to defeat the Israeli state, Iran can’t. And not for lack of trying. They don’t have the wherewithal, and probably never will.

As for Hamas, Netanyahu’s killed everything but the idea and Yahya Sinwar. Wherever he is these days, Haniyeh’s got plenty of company. Israel’s sent thousands of his associates to the great beyond since October, including Mohammed Deif who, in the final analysis, only had eight lives. Sinwar’s still among the living, sort of. He’s a dead man walking, and he’s also a live man walking among the dead, holed up as he is in the nightmarish network of catacombs he and Deif built under Gaza. He’s almost surely going to die down there.

There’s no future in any of this. For anybody. Coming quickly full circle, it’s inanity. Bloody, macabre inanity all carried out in the name of gods, holy books and sacred land.