Western governments, such as those of Italy and Germany, are calling on their citizens to leave Lebanon immediately, while airlines such as Lufthansathe Air France and the Royal Jordanianstop flying to Beirut. The German Lufthansa announced that it was suspending its flights, while the representative of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on his compatriots to leave Lebanon with other airlines… while there is still time.
“Cyprus will continue to function as a bridge of security”, said the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cyprus, Konstantinos Kombosunderlining that Nicosia is ready to “facilitate the safe removal of citizens”, while France and Belgium were preparing to remove their own nationals from the city they once called the “Paris of the Middle East”.
No, the war that everyone fears and exorcises has not yet begun… but it looks menacingly close now, or rather even closer. In one sense, this war has already begun a long time ago, within a framework of geographically limited bombings and sporadic airstrikes.
From October 2023
Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire since the fall of 2023, against the background of the war that broke out in Gaza after the attacks of 7her October. Fires which have led to the evacuation of the bombed areas on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border, while the Israelis have meanwhile carried out some notable “surgical” strikes in Beirut, such as the one last January against the deputy leader of Hamas, Saleh al- Aururi.
The tension on the Israel-Hezbollah axis is over more “explosive” than at any other time in the last 18 yearsfrom the 2006 war i.e. and then. It is recalled that the sides in question, Israel on the one hand and the Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah on the other, were involved in a 34-day war in the summer of 2006, with the clashes then taking place in northern Israel, southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights.
Now, exactly 18 years later, the international community is running to prevent the possibility of a new war that everyone, including those directly involved, declares that they are avoiding but, in practice, they are approaching…
«They would prefer to avoid it (including war) but this is becoming more difficult“, wrote the Economist last June.
«Will Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel go to war?“, Al Jazeera asked in its analysis at the beginning of the summer, returning to a topic that had occupied the international media again at the end of 2023 (against the background of the sermon delivered on November 3 by Hassan Nasrallah) but also in the spring of 2024.
Reasons for concern
The prospect of such a war terrifies the international community, as:
- could lead to the total (economic, social, state) collapse of Lebanon – under collapse as of 2019 – with the footnote that Lebanon also hosts many refugees from other countries in the Middle East (Palestinians, Syrians, etc.). )
- would torpedo any prospect of a truce in Gaza
- would push the Iran-Israel conflict to the extreme while also testing relations in the West-Iran axis
- it would open a new front in the Eastern Mediterranean region at a politically critical time
- it would skyrocket the intensity of military conflict, as Hezbollah is much more powerful militarily than Hamas…
The frame
In Iran, just a few weeks ago, a “moderate/reformer”, Mr Massoud Pezeskian. In the US, on the other hand, the presidential election is next in November with Kamala Harris now taking Biden’s place against Trump, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to restore his ties with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by claiming a strengthened regional roll at the expense of the Kurds but also of Israel with which a new front of rhetorically extreme and therefore very difficult to reverse confrontation has now been opened…
As for the Americans, they have long been trying to keep the Middle East tension under control, sending Amos Hochstein to Lebanon (four times in Beirut in just nine months, as the Al Monitor website reported in an analysis at the end of June) and Brett McGurk in secret talks with the Iranians in Oman last January (as the FT and NY Times had called it).
However, Washington, as has been seen in practice in recent years, is finding it difficult to “rein” the Israelis and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The “previous” of April
But also his Iran 85-year-old Khamenei for his part, he has shown in practice in recent months that he intends to test the tolerance of his “enemies”, when he attacked, for example, with a “rain” of drones and missiles against Israel on April 13-14.
Could he attempt something similar in the future…if Hezbollah is threatened?
The 64-year-old Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah stands out as the most important of Iran’s proxies but also as that pillar of the so-called “axis of resistance” that is closest to Tehran and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), compared for example to the Houthis who seem to retain a degree of autonomy. Therefore, if it were in danger of being crushed by an external enemy, it is clear that Tehran would rush to defend it, no longer through proxies but directly (targeting Israeli positions, as it did last April)… The newly elected president of Iran, Massoud Pezeskian, however, warned for his part that an Israeli attack on Lebanon would have “serious consequences”…
What may come next…
Israeli officials on the other hand, speaking on condition of anonymity to the Reuters agency, say that it is not their intention to start a new total war in the Middle East region. At the same time, however, the Israeli leadership (Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Galand, etc.) vows revenge for last Saturday’s deadly strike in the Golan Heights with Druze Arab victims, a strike the Israelis blamed on Hezbollah although the latter denies any involvement. “Most observers agree that the rocket that hit the Druze village of Majal Shams must have landed there by mistake – not long before, Hezbollah had claimed responsibility for several attacks on Israeli military positions nearby,” Middle notes in its analysis. Eastern Institute.
What could practically follow in the next 24 hours? Possibly a well-targeted military operation – lasting a few hours or days – by the Israelis?
However, if we take what happened in the Israel-Iran axis as a “precedent”. the first fortnight of Aprilthat is, from the attack launched by the Israelis on April 1st against the Iranian consulate in Damascus until the Iranian “counterattack” on April 14th against the Israelis, then the counter Israel-Hezbollah it could possibly be detonated after having previously “experienced” a new – short and geographically limited – escalation.
«The most likely scenario is that of a series of heavy Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah military targets in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley“, writes Paul Salem in his analysis at the Middle East Institute.
The problem however, specifically with relationships Israel-Hezbollahis that they already have behind them… high levels of accumulated tension…
2024-07-29 19:58:00