Sputnik
Amid Israel’s ongoing war on Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been threatening to expand the Gaza conflict into Lebanon against Hezbollah.
If current Israel-Lebanon tensions were to spiral out of control, this could “impose a heavy toll on both countries in this conflict,” Joseph Helou, assistant professor of political science and international affairs at the Department of Social and Education Sciences at the Lebanese American University, told Sputnik.
From the outset of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, the entire Middle East has been, to varying degrees, a powder keg fraught with continuous rounds of conflict, he noted, adding that now the Israeli prime minister “seems to be making aggressive moves to render future conflicts very costly in terms of human lives and material losses.”
Israel is “prepared for an extremely powerful action in the north” against Hezbollah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on June 5, amid an escalation of cross-border skirmishes, which have included Hezbollah drone attacks inside Israel and the shootdown of a heavy Israeli drone over Lebanese airspace. Netanyahu spoke in the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, which has been evacuating civilians amid the fighting. The PM vowed to "bring back security," as he referenced the Axis of Resistance, which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria, Iraqi Shia militias, and Yemen’s Houthis.
Looking at the dynamics of the escalation, he recalled that after the Palestinian-Israeli conflict spiraled in the wake of the attack by Hamas in October last year, there was only limited military border skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah claimed it was its way of offering a “supportive front for Gaza,” claiming that the group would end the combat once the war on Gaza is terminated.
Once Israel struck the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, and intensified attacks on villages in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah beefed up its own drone attacks. Recent developments have shown that Hezbollah possesses advanced techniques to command operations via Iran-made drones, the scholar said, and recalled that “Hezbollah officials have publicly stated that only part of their military panoply has been used” so far.
“Hezbollah has developed enormous capabilities in terms of techniques and military strategies, not only weaponry, which makes a conflict between two strong actors quite destructive,” the pundit remarked.
Stopping short of speculating on the sort of operations that Israel would be capable of carrying out in the northern regions of the country and in southern areas of Lebanon, the professor stressed:
“Increased capabilities on both sides of the conflict places the situation on high alert, rendering any real impact assessment of military operations very tentative.” He noted that Hezbollah has “bypassed and even destroyed Israeli defenses on several occasions.”
Gaza will “look like a playground compared to Lebanon” if the current escalation "results in Iran trying to help Hezbollah and Lebanon,” Dr. Shaul Bartal, a retired lieutenant colonel and researcher at Israel's Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, told Sputnik.
He noted that a further regional war may “end in the destruction of entire regions in Israel, but also in colossal destruction in Lebanon and Iran.”
Currently, Israel's goal in the standoff with Hezbollah is to remove the Lebanese Shiite movement from the border "as far as beyond the Litani River, and even beyond a range of 10-15 km,” Dr. Bartal remarked. If there is a political agreement with the Lebanese government according to which only its army is allowed to operate in southern Lebanon and Hezbollah is removed from the border, then “the war in the north will end,” he noted.
However, failing that, in a further tit-for-tat, Hezbollah “could use the 150,000 missiles it has against Israel,” while Tel Aviv, in turn, would wreak “enormous destruction” upon Lebanon.
1 comment:
The target was never Israel. It is the same plan the west had for Russia, chew up all their military in Uke and then invade a weakened Russia. Now the East is using the same strategi on Amonkey. The WOKE west cannot possibly increase their production, they are broke, they have sent most manufacturing to the east, Immigrants will not fight for the west, people will not fight for a government that oppresses them, the list is endless.
No one cares how many people in the middle east are killed they are just pawns in a bigger game.
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