“Our goals are clear,” he boasted, “and our actions speak for themselves.” While the second part of the statement is true in terms of the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in both Lebanon and Gaza, it is definitely not true that the Israeli premier has any clear goals or even a strategy now that he has opened a second war front in Lebanon.

Hizbullah rockets, launched in solidarity with Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza, have displaced over 80,000 Israelis. Last week, barely a day after declaring that military action was the only way to deter the Iran-backed Lebanese resistance group, the Israeli army started a new phase in its war against it.

Revealing a long-prepared espionage plan that infiltrated Hizbullah’s communications system, Israel detonated more than 3000 pagers simultaneously, killing dozens and severely wounding hundreds. By doing so it actually carried out an unprecedented act of terrorism that has rocked the entire world security system.

A day later, while Hizbullah fighters and supporters were holding funerals for those killed in the pagers’ attack, Israel struck again, this time detonating larger walkie-talkies that have been compromised and filled with explosives, killing and wounding hundreds, including women and children.

The technology that Israel used to lace the batteries of thousands of pagers sold to Hizbullah with extremely small amounts of powerful explosives has created havoc not just in Lebanon, but among world security agencies who had to carry out a detailed investigation into their communication equipment, fearing they could similarly have been compromised by either explosives or spyware.

Several security experts have also warned that, by carrying out such an unprecedented, coordinated attack in which the pagers and walkie-talkies were detonated, Israel has in effect primed terrorist groups to replicate that model. The nature of the attacks, which transformed ordinary objects into weapons, raised alarms and drew widespread condemnation at a UN Security Council meeting held late last week following Israel’s escalation in Lebanon.

“These attacks represent a new development in warfare, where communication tools become weapons, simultaneously exploding across marketplaces, on street corners and in homes as daily life unfolds,” Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, told council members. He added that the operations had unleashed “widespread fear, panic and horror” among people in Lebanon, who now fear that any device may be vulnerable.

“This cannot be the new normal,” Türk said, calling for an “independent, transparent and thorough” investigation into the attacks and holding the perpetrators accountable for violating the rules of war and human rights law.

Using any means necessary to push Hizbullah and Iran into an open confrontation that would upstage the one-year-old war in Gaza, Israel sent fighter jets on Friday to strike two buildings in Beirut’s southern neighbourhood, known as a Hizbullah stronghold, killing Aqil along with 15 other senior commanders and fighters and dozens of civilians residing in the two buildings. Lebanese emergency workers were pulling the bodies out from under the rubble for days.

While bombing non-stop hundreds of targets allegedly used by Hizbullah to launch rockets, on Monday the Israeli army further escalated its attacks all over Lebanon, killing 492 people, mostly civilians, and wounding over 1645 people.

Israel was still carrying out merciless attacks by the time Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, recklessly killing Lebanese civilians and forcing thousands to flee their homes. Yet the worst part of last week’s escalation was that the world, including Israel’s key allies who provide its army with weapons, have been watching with the same indifference.  

Netanyahu might feel victorious after the series of attacks his army and intelligence agencies conducted against Hizbullah over the past week, increasing his popularity figures in opinion polls and delaying his ouster from office. Yet, after decades of wreaking havoc and sabotaging all efforts to reach a permanent settlement in the region, Netanyahu should be the first to acknowledge that the current Israeli surge will be short-lived. The escalation in Lebanon will certainly not achieve the declared goal of Netanyahu’s extremist government, which is the return of Israelis to their homes along the border.

Hizbullah, or any of the resistance movements confronting Israel in Palestine and Lebanon, are the first to acknowledge that their adversary maintains a far superior edge on both technological and military levels. Yet such a massive advantage, backed by the United States and major European allies, has never managed to stop Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to the Israeli occupation for decades. Even if the Israeli army and intelligence agencies managed to deal hard blows to Hizbullah and Hamas over the past year, Netanyahu and his generals have seen for themselves how they consistently managed to regroup, recruit younger and more militant members, and come up with new means to confirm that they would not give up their strong belief in resisting occupation. Hamas’ stunning 7 October attack on Israeli army posts and nearby settlements is just the most recent reminder.

The world should not allow a repetition of the Gaza scenario in Lebanon, at a time when it’s actually Hizbullah and Iran who have been practising restraint in order to prevent Netanyahu and his extremist ministers from pushing the region towards an all-out war in which Israel’s key ally, the United States, would be involved.

On the margins of the annual United Nations General Assembly meetings this week, France requested an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the dangerous developments in Lebanon. Hopefully the world can do more than issuing a statement calling on both parties to avoid escalation, and acknowledge that the way to calm the Lebanese front as well as the entire region is to immediately end the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Otherwise, we are heading towards an endless state of war in which civilians are going to suffer the most.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly