Without prejudging the scale of Hezbollah’s military response, which has been described in advance as ” terrible “ Thursday, September 19 by its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, after the wave of explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies on Tuesday and Wednesday – which left 37 dead and some 3,000 injured mainly in the ranks of the Lebanese armed group, but also within the civilian population – Israel is preparing for the possibility of an open war in Lebanon.
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From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Israeli leaders and military officials have been hammering home the terms of a guiding principle that a high-intensity conflict with Hezbollah involving a ground operation in Lebanon is possible, and that anything could trigger it. “The shift could be rapid”believes a Western diplomatic source. The day before, the Minister of Defense repeated that “the center of gravity [du conflit] moves north »with the consequence of devoting “strengths, resources and energy” used so far in the Gaza Strip.
On Thursday evening, at the end of a day marked by a series of air strikes targeting around a hundred rocket launch sites, the Minister of Defense assured that military operations would ” continue “In previous days, maneuvers simulating an invasion of Lebanese territory had been carried out towards the border, involving two brigades. In response, Hezbollah also intensified its fire towards Israel. On Thursday, two Israeli soldiers were killed.
“Refocusing”
While a long series of shootings and strikes across the “blue line” (the border drawn by the UN between Lebanon and Israel) set the two sides in a war of attrition in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, preparations for an open conflict were carried out on the Israeli side during the summer, and accelerated in September, particularly in terms of troop transfers. Monday, September 16, The World met a paratrooper who had recently left Gaza after months of operations. Along with other members of the same brigade, he was taking a break in Jerusalem before heading to northern Israel to his new cantonment near the border.
The army announced on Wednesday that it had transferred the entire 98e division – which includes the Paratroopers Brigade – in the north of the country. In total, observers estimate that three-quarters of the troops that Israel was to extract from Gaza and move to the north of the Hebrew state, before being able to carry out an operation in Lebanon, would be deployed in the border area, or about to be. At the same time, operations and airstrikes continue in the Gaza Strip.
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