NEED TO KNOW
The Acceleration
LEBANON
Starting on Sept. 17, hundreds of pagers and two-way handheld radios exploded in homes, supermarkets, buses, hospitals, and on the streets of Beirut and elsewhere, killing at least 37 people and injuring more than 3,000. Many Lebanese, recalling the port explosions in the capital four years ago, reacted in mass panic.
“I can’t believe this is happening again. How many more disasters can we endure?” wondered Jocelyn Hallak, a mother of three, during an interview with the Associated Press. “All this pain, when will it end?”
The Israelis haven’t taken responsibility for the attacks even as they are widely credited for it.
Regardless, it was a shocking and audacious act that left even close observers of the Middle East stunned, and worried about a widening conflict. Meanwhile, as the Economist noted, “The attacks signaled a shift, with Israel taking the initiative in ratcheting up the war.”
Israeli military folks agree. “You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming,” retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum comprising hawkish former military commanders, told the Times of Israel. “Why didn’t we do it for 11 months? Because we were not willing to go to war yet. What’s happening now? Israel is ready for war.”
As a result, two days after the tech attacks, Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood, a Hezbollah stronghold, killing Ibrahim Aqil, a founding member of the group and its operations chief, along with commanders of the elite Radwan Force and more than 40 other people, the Middle East Eye reported.
Since then, it’s been a theater of escalation: Since Monday, Israel has struck more than 1,500 targets in Lebanon, hitting what it said were militant sites linked to Hezbollah in the country’s south and east and in Beirut. The strikes have killed at least 564 people in Lebanon, including 50 children, and wounded almost 2,000, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Thousands have fled their homes.
The strikes occurred after Iran-backed Hezbollah shot more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, noted Al Jazeera. Those rockets were fired as retaliation against Israel for an airstrike that killed a top Hezbollah commander near Beirut a few days before.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets intermittently at Israel since Israeli forces began pounding the Gaza Strip in response to Iran-backed terror group Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed more than 1,200 people.
As Tarek Abou Jaoude of Queen’s University Belfast wrote in the Conversation, war has been brewing for months between Israel and Hezbollah, with tensions periodically rising even as neither side has really planned for a war.
“But things now seem quite different,” he said, referring to the tech attacks. Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah “has already declared that a ‘reckoning will happen.’ And, while he has promised similar vendettas for the previous attacks, a humiliation on this scale could very well push Hezbollah to up the ante even further.”
Israelis, meanwhile, want the 60,000 Israelis displaced from northern Israel to be able to go home.
“The center of gravity is shifting to the north,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently, meaning that the Israeli military is changing gears to focus more on Lebanon even as the Gaza conflict continues, the Associated Press reported.
But even if Hezbollah wants a war, the majority of Lebanese don’t. Lebanon, grappling with a deep economic and political crisis, can’t survive one, many believe.
“There is no doubt it is a scary moment,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib told CNN. “And we are afraid of a coming war because we don’t want a war.”
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