>>507467686They didn't sacrifice them. They got outplayed and had no cards to play. The chain of events launched by Hamas fucked all their plans. Their initial idea was of saturation strikes against Israel with an unlimited stream of thousands of missiles.
The worse thing for them is a war of attrition where their missile sites are gradually destroyed one after the other which is what happened.
They were slowly cooked like a frog.
Hezbollah couldn't justify to themselves nor their supporters not joining the war with Gaza so they did in the most suicidal fashion of all.
They just tried to divert Israeli forces to the north to lessen rhe pressure on hamas by hitting selectively targets military posts and being warry against escalating out of fear of direct involvement of the global west.
All Israel had to do to respond to these telegraphed attacks was strike launch sites and let the US NSA listen to the communications in entire lebanon to get more Intel on what to strike.
If iran and it's allies were afraid of escalating Israel was the one to escalate. But gradually, slowly, given that the adversary would be too afraid to play with its strengths. In the previous Israeli attacks on iran, they destroyed missile manufacturing sites and silos before letting America calm them down.