LHezbollah understands very well that we can inflict enormous damage on Lebanon if a war is launched.”, Minister Yoav Gallant declared to the press at the end of a several-day visit to Washington. “We have the capacity to return Lebanon to the Stone Age, but we do not want to do it (…) We do not want a war“, he added, specifying that the Israeli government “prepared for any scenario”.
The spread to Lebanon of Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip would be “potentially apocalyptic”, had earlier warned from Geneva the head of humanitarian affairs of the UN, Martin Griffiths. “I see this as the spark that will ignite the powder”, he underlined, believing that a conflict involving Lebanon “will win Syria… will win the others“territories of the region, leading to consequences”unpredictable”.
During the night from Wednesday to Thursday, witnesses reported bombings in different sectors of the Gaza Strip, while in Lebanon, five people were injured in an Israeli airstrike on a building in Nabatiyeh (south), according to the official Lebanese agency Ani.
In Syria, two people were killed in an Israeli strike shortly before midnight, the official Sana news agency reported, citing a military source. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the strike targeted a service center of a foundation affiliated with Lebanese Hezbollah and pro-Iranian groups, near the capital Damascus.
And in Yemen, the US Army Middle East Command reported destroying a “radar” Houthi rebels, allies of Hamas, who target international maritime traffic in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden in “solidarity” with the people of Gaza.
The war in Gaza has led to an outbreak of violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon, where exchanges of fire are almost daily between Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Palestinian Hamas, and the Israeli army. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that the phase “intense“fighting was coming to an end in the Gaza Strip and claimed that then Israel could “redeploy some forces towards the north”, on the border with Lebanon, “for defensive purposes”.
“It seems that Israel, which devastated Gaza, is now setting its sights on Lebanon. We see that Western powers support Israel behind the scenes”, declared Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his part. “Netanyahu’s plans to expand the war to the region will lead to great disaster”, he added. Like Canada, Germany followed suit by calling on its nationals on Wednesday to leave Lebanon.
“A war between Israel and Hezbollah could easily become a regional war, with disastrous consequences for the Middle East”, also worried the American Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, when receiving Yoav Gallant in Washington. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned last week that “no place” in Israel would not, if necessary, be spared by his movement, the day after an announcement by the Israeli army according to which “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon” had been “validated”.
Hezbollah opened the front with Israel in support of Hamas in the aftermath of the attack carried out on October 7 by Hamas in southern Israel, which resulted in the death of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data. In retaliation, Israel launched an offensive in the Gaza Strip where more than 37,718 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since the beginning of the war, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-led government.
