Facing the failure of his fallacy over the “existential threat” that the border between Egypt and Gaza, known as Salaheddine or Philadephi Corridor, posed to Israel’s security, he has had to think of something else.

Suffering internal political chaos and nearly daily reports of the imminent firing of his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu held a late-night cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss the deteriorating situation along the border with Lebanon, and declared that the return of Israeli residents to settlements in the north has now been added as one of the goals of the war the Israeli army has been conducting for nearly a year against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Over 80,000 Israelis were displaced after Lebanon’s Hizbullah started launching rockets along the border in solidarity with the Palestinian people confronting Israel’s genocidal war.

Gallant has sharply disagreed with Netanyahu over the stalled talks to reach a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel. But they both issued stern threats this week that a war against Lebanon might be close, ignoring the simple fact that the latest round of escalation along the Lebanon-Israel border took place after Israel assassinated Hizbullah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut on 30 July.

Like all commanders of Israeli security agencies, Gallant, known as a hardliner, has charged that by intentionally seeking to sabotage ceasefire talks mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, through placing new conditions such as maintaining the Israeli occupation of the Egypt-Gaza border, Netanyahu simply does not care about the fate of more than 100 Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since the stunning 7 October attack against army posts and nearby settlements. Netanyahu has falsely claimed that Hamas was smuggling weapons along the border with Egypt, reviving an old lie that had not been repeated for 10 years.

Not only did the chiefs of Israeli security agencies note that the army can always return to the border if the ceasefire talks fail to bring the war to a permanent end. This week the Israeli army also announced that, four months after occupying all of southern Gaza, including Rafah and the border with Egypt, displacing more than one million Palestinians in the process, they managed to unearth a total of only nine tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. In a direct blow to any shred of credibility Netanyahu might have, the IOF added that all nine tunnels were sealed from the Egyptian side, and have not been functional for a long time.

More than a dozen foreign reporters the Israeli army escorted early this week into Gaza, giving them access to the occupied Strip for the first time since the war started a year ago, simply found nothing to report on that could back up Netanyahu’s hallucination of tunnels used to smuggle weapons to Hamas in Gaza. It is not a story worthy of a reporter’s attention that tunnels along the Egypt-Gaza border had existed for commercial purposes in order to overcome the tight Israeli siege of Palestinians since unilaterally withdrawing from the Strip in 2005. Yet, even those tunnels have been tightly sealed while Egypt was confronting terrorism in Sinai in 2014 and 2015.

Instead of issuing an apology for spreading lies, and finalising the ceasefire agreement being negotiated by months over many rounds of talks in Cairo and Doha, Netanyahu and his rival, Gallant, were united in threatening to go to war with Lebanon, reflecting the reckless, if not absurd behaviour of the current, extremist Israeli government.

Following a meeting with US envoy to Lebanon and Israel, Amos Hochstein, on Monday, Gallant argued: “The only way left to return the residents of the north to their homes is via military action.” Gallant said he had delivered the same message to the US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austine, in a phone call on Monday.  

After a similar meeting with Hochstein, Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that, “while Israel appreciates and respects the support of the US, it will ultimately do what is necessary to safeguard its security and return the residents of the north securely to their homes.”

One wonders if there is any logic to the arguments made by Gallant and Netanyahu. All military experts and parties involved in diplomatic effort to restore stability to the region acknowledge that any Israeli military adventure against Lebanon can only mean the residents of its northern town would probably be displaced for months or years. If Hamas has managed to stand up to Israel’s merciless war for nearly a year now, Hizbullah’s military capabilities, far more advanced than those of Hamas, can definitely last much longer, and will probably cause greater damage inside Israel.

If Israel launched a war against Lebanon, its only aim would be destruction and revenge, without achieving any military victory. Knowing that Hizbullah would not be alone in this war, and that other groups in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq known to receive backing from Iran are likely to be involved, it’s not only the residents of northern Israeli towns who would be displaced, but probably those of major Israeli cities as well.

All concerned parties, topped with the United States, have a responsibility to stop this madness and stop Netanyahu’s efforts to seek revenge for the 7 October attacks and his repeated failures from setting the entire region on fire.  

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly