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September 24 (Business Insider) – Israel may have pushed Hezbollah into a dangerous corner, and fears are now growing that they’re on the brink of an all-out war.
On Sunday, Naim Qassem, a leader of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militia, said the group had entered a “battle of reckoning” with Israel.
His comments followed a weekend of intensifying clashes between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.
Israel said it had destroyed thousands of the group’s missile and rocket launchers in airstrikes in southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah’s missiles reached Haifa in Israel.
On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces warned civilians in Lebanon to stay away from prospective Hezbollah targets for their “own safety.”
Retaliation is becoming more likely
World leaders are urging both sides to step back from the prospect of a wider war, with the US’s yearlong attempt to prevent an escalation in the conflict that erupted after the October 7 terror attacks on Israel apparently unraveling.
Now it’s likely that Hezbollah will retaliate with full force, experts say.
“Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no interest in a major regional conflagration, but these attacks make a greater reaction inevitable to the net of any self-restraining stance,” Filippo Dionigi, a senior lecturer on international relations at the University of Bristol, told Business Insider.
Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, told The Wall Street Journal that Israel had forced Hezbollah into choosing one of two options: Relent or take the bait and retaliate. He said the latter was most likely.
Eugene Rogan, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford, told BI that Israel appeared to be seeking escalation.
“Whatever Israel intends by this string of attacks on Hezbollah, this is not what de-escalation looks like,” he said.
It comes after handheld radios and pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across the country last week, killing 37 people and wounding about 3,000, according to Lebanese authorities.
“After the dozens killed and thousands wounded by exploding devices last week, the series of airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon make for too many blows for Hezbollah to accept without reprisal,” Rogan said. “It seems that Israel needs little more pretext for the current air strategy to lead to a ground attack.”
He added: “Under the circumstances, the region would appear to be on the brink of all-out war in Lebanon.”
Firing the first shots
Israel appears determined to take the fight to Hezbollah as part of what it says is a mission to restore security in the north of the country.
The “dual communications device attacks pushed Hezbollah into a corner,” analysts from the Atlantic Council said last week.
They said that proposed French and US diplomatic solutions had failed to offer a long-term solution to the threat Hezbollah posed to Israel.
Speculation is mounting that Israel may launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, as it did in 2006, but some believe that the country will limit itself to airstrikes against missile facilities.
Axios reported that the Biden administration may use the clashes to put pressure on Hezbollah to strike a diplomatic deal.
“The diplomatic track, instead, is unlikely to achieve results unless the parties agree on a compromise that allows for a cease-fire,” Dionigi said, such as the withdrawal of Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and Israel from occupied Lebanese territory.
But it’s a situation that could spiral out of control, dragging other regional powers into a war from which there is no easy path back.
The UN special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, wrote on X that the Middle East was on the brink of “imminent catastrophe.”
“It cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer,” she wrote Sunday.
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