Only this week, Hezbollah has lobbed scores of rockets and explosives-laden drones at Israel, including at a Greek Orthodox church, wounding two Israeli Christians.
Elsewhere, drones targeted the Egyptian resort city of Dahab in the Sinai Peninsula, in the second such incident in a month. There also was an explosion outside the Israeli Embassy in India’s capital, New Delhi. On Monday, an airstrike ascribed to Israel hit near Syria’s capital, Damascus, and killed a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The group has vowed that Israel will “pay.”
“We are now at a fork in the road: Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with U.N. Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves,” Eylon Levy, spokesman for the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday. “Hezbollah and its Iranian warlord patrons are dragging Lebanon into a totally unnecessary war, into the war that Hamas started. Our region does not deserve a broader war.”
“We are in a multifront war,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday. “We have been attacked from seven arenas and we have already operated in six of them. Anyone who maneuvers against us is a target.”
Gallant was referring to the “arenas” of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Iran and Yemen. According to Israeli media, he said Israel has not yet acted in Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have for weeks been firing missiles at Israel and at commercial sea vessels, sparking havoc along international shipping routes.
Iranian-supported militant groups in Lebanon and across the region have become more active since Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise assault in Israel, in which it killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages. Hamas had sought to involve Lebanon’s Hezbollah, as well as militant groups in the West Bank and across the region, in an effort to spark a regional war and bring the Palestinian cause back to the center of the Middle East debate.
But after Israel attacked Gaza, Hezbollah did not join the fight, puzzling the Israeli military as it scrambled to assess the war’s parameters, said Jacques Neriah, a former chief military intelligence analyst for Israel who also served as a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“What we know now is that Hezbollah engaged on Oct. 8, and gradually it became more and more daring, until it reached a situation of today, where it’s using all its weapons except the long-range weapons,” Neriah said.
In recent weeks, Israel has evacuated 70,000 people from its northern border, in addition to the 150,000 evacuated from its southern border with Gaza. In Lebanon, too, 120,000 people have fled their homes.
Three people were killed Tuesday night in what Lebanese media said was an Israeli airstrike in Bin Jbeil, a southern Lebanese town that Israel considers a Hezbollah stronghold. Australian media reported that one of the men was an Australian citizen who was in town to visit his wife, and was planning to move with her to Australia. Australia’s Foreign Ministry is investigating the incident. An Israeli military official, while not officially claiming the strike, said the fatalities were two militants and the wife of one of the men.
The increasing tensions on Israel’s north come as it is expanding its operation in Gaza, moving farther into central and southern parts of the enclave. But indications are mounting that the war will also include Lebanon, and potentially the wider region.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it hit about 200 military targets in Gaza on Tuesday night, including in the Shejaiya district, where battles have raged in densely populated neighborhoods that Israel says seem to have been heavily booby-trapped ahead of time.
More than 21,100 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, according to Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant fatalities, but the majority of the dead are estimated to be women and children. In the Maghazi refugee camp, six people were killed in a bombing that targeted a middle school for girls, Hamas-run al-Aqsa TV reported Wednesday.
The IDF has estimated that the death toll includes 8,000 combatants. More than 164 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the start of the war.
A war with Lebanon would no doubt add to that pain. Hezbollah is estimated to have an arsenal of about 150,000 missiles and is very well trained.
The mounting tensions come as Egypt and Qatar are floating deals to pause or end Israel’s Gaza campaign, potentially in return for the release of the estimated 130 hostages still being held in the enclave. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his foreign minister arrived in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss proposals that could include efforts to halt the displacement of Palestinians, to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, and to reinstate regional security, according to Egyptian media reports.
But for displaced Israeli residents like Sigal Vishnetzer — who hails from the northern Kibbutz Manara, which has been declared a closed military zone and where 86 of 155 homes have been destroyed by fighting — the only possible scenario is the return of security and the return of residents to their homes.
“We know that we will return after the war,” Vishnetzer told Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. “We only hope that we will count in months, not years.”
Mellen reported from Jerusalem. Miriam Berger in Jerusalem, Heba Mahfouz in Cairo, Hajar Harb in London and Hazem Balousha in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
