ISRAEL HAS A CHOICE TO MAKE
First, the tit-for-tat escalation between these two long-standing foes considerably picked up during the last a number of months with Israeli assassinations of senior Hezbollah (and Hamas) operatives and intensifying cross-border missile assaults and air strikes.
Some 60,000 Israeli residents have been displaced on that aspect of the border, round 100,000 on the opposite aspect. As well as, the injury to largely civilian infrastructure – homes, faculties, retailers, water provides, the electrical energy grid – can be substantial, particularly in southern Lebanon.
Any additional escalation would merely result in extra human struggling, and, given the experiences of Gaza, a deliberate selection by the Israeli authorities to embark on such a plan of action is hardly prone to persuade Western leaders that they need to spend extra political and monetary capital on supporting Mr Netanyahu.
Very like the inconclusive 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, any new floor offensive by Israeli forces into Lebanon could be a conflict of selection, and arguably one for the aim of prolonging Mr Netanyahu’s political survival.
What’s extra, as we speak’s Hezbollah is a much more potent adversary than it was practically 20 years in the past when it managed to struggle Israeli forces to a stalemate. Its hyperlinks with its foremost backer, Iran, are extra stable, and have enabled the group to construct up a major arsenal of refined weapons that, if deployed en masse, may simply overwhelm Israel’s air defences and trigger substantial casualties and injury to army and civilian infrastructure.
The so-called axis of resistance, managed by Tehran, may moreover renew its efforts not solely to focus on Israel but in addition the pursuits of its Western allies within the area and past.
Due to this fact, an Israeli selection of escalation, and particularly one which carries important dangers of each an inconclusive end result of the conflict with Hezbollah and of a wider regional escalation that the West has labored laborious to keep away from over the previous eleven and a half months since Oct 7, is unlikely to result in sustained, not to mention elevated, help for Israel.
