After three weeks of relative calm since Hizbullah struck an Israeli intelligence base on the outskirts of Tel Aviv in retaliation for its assassination of the Hizbullah military commander Fuad Shukr, Israel is once again threatening full-scale war against Lebanon. 

Israel’s sudden return to sabre-rattling accompanies a surge in military operations against Southern Lebanon, where Israel claims it has struck some Hizbullah ammunitions and missiles depots.

On Tuesday, Israel hacked the communications devices used by Hizbullah, causing them to explode and causing 1,000 people to be wounded in the Beirut neighbourhood of Dahiyeh and others to be killed in the south of the country in an alleged cyberattack.

According to a Hizbullah official, it is the “biggest security breach yet” since 7 October last year. A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut amid widespread panic.

Residents said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts. The security source added that devices were also exploding in the south of Lebanon.

The latest Israeli attacks targeted the towns of Adaisseh, Blida, Tair Harfa, Taybeh, and Houla, killing four people, including a Hizbullah fighter, and injuring several paramedics.

Meanwhile, Israeli fighter jets continue to break the sound barrier in Southern Lebanon, dropping leaflets ordering residents in the Wazzani area to evacuate.

Israeli threats against Lebanon are hardly new. Israel has been repeating them regularly every few months since October 2023, and often they are accompanied by a chorus of Western powers’ warnings to their citizens in Lebanon to leave and halts to flights to Beirut and Tel Aviv.

Another feature has been the speedy arrival of US Envoy Amos Hochstein to Israel and Lebanon to urge the two countries to exercise restraint and not to drag the region into a broader war.

Invariably, Israeli threats and aggressions are accompanied by Washington’s pious refrain that Israel has the “right to defend itself” and by upping the readiness of US naval forces in a show of military support for Israel.

Not surprisingly, Hochstein once again flew to the region after the latest developments. This time, however, he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that an all-out attack against Lebanon would not bring back the hostages and would not make the north safer for the settlers, but that it could ignite a multi-front regional war.

In a remarkable precedent, the Pentagon also withdrew the USS Roosevelt from the Eastern Mediterranean in what was seen as an attempt to lower the tensions in the region.

Clearly, the Israeli thirst to escalate the war in the north of the country has not met with US encouragement. Washington wants all fronts to deescalate to make way for the hostage/prisoner exchange, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and an end to the war there, which would lead to calm on the Lebanese front as well.

However, Netanyahu does not want the war to end, but instead wants to ignite new fronts, which is why he ordered the assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Shukr, unleashed military assaults against the Occupied West Bank, and then began provoking Hizbullah. 

An estimated 200,000 people have been evacuated from settlements in northern Israel to put them out of range of Hizbullah’s missiles. The Israeli government is hosting them with full board in hotels in the interior, which is an economic burden that it would like to shed. However, an Israeli attack on Lebanon is only likely to aggravate and prolong the situation. 

Israel has long campaigned to get Hizbullah and its missiles to withdraw beyond the Litani River and create a buffer zone inside Lebanon. It attempted to do this militarily and failed, and it has repeatedly tried it through diplomatic means, with a train of Western officials visiting Beirut in recent months.

Hizbullah naturally rejects the plan and conditions any discussion on arrangements in Lebanon on the end of the war against Gaza. While Hochstein and others shuttle back and forth to Beirut, Israel barks threats and backs these up with displays of military muscle to lend them credibility. 

At all events, it looks as if Israel has sent the Western envoys on a fool’s errand. Hizbullah has already shown that its missiles can reach Tel Aviv, even if launched from the northernmost point in Lebanon.

During the past 11 months of tit-for-tat missile exchanges with Israel, Hizbullah has not touched the arsenal it reserves for defending Lebanon. Moreover, Hizbullah’s drones have exposed the Achille’s heel in Israeli Air Defences, which have repeatedly failed to intercept them.

If Netanyahu thinks that a full-scale war on Lebanon will impose a new balance of power in Israel’s favour, he should not expect this to be easy. Hizbullah has the means not only to maintain the current balance of power along the Israeli-Lebanese front, but also to create burdens for Israel that are heavier than that of hosting evacuees in hotels.

Not only can Hizbullah repel an Israeli ground offensive, as it has done before, it can also shift the battleground from Southern Lebanon into Israel. The next wave of evacuations will be in the Israeli interior, not just from the fringes.

But while the Lebanese resistance movement may not fear a ground invasion, it is wary of Israeli plans to expand its assassination campaigns, which would mean an expansion of Israeli operations of varying degrees of violence and destructiveness in the southern suburbs of Beirut. 

Netanyahu certainly knows the risks he would court by escalating the confrontation with Hizbullah. This is why he is using the threat of escalation to blackmail various parties in Israel and abroad. His main priority is to stay in power and to keep his government from collapsing, which means averting the inevitable deal to end the war.

He is thus trying to outmanoeuvre others, such as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who wants to bring the war to a quick end. Evidently, Gallant understood Netanyahu’s ploy, which probably aimed to force out Gallant and bring in another more compliant minister, because he outbid Netanyahu in sounding the war drums in the northern direction to appear just as concerned for the welfare of the northern evacuees.

Netanyahu is also using the tension his brinksmanship has created to compel the international powers to pressure Lebanon to force Hizbullah to decouple the cessation of hostilities between it and Israel from an end to the Israeli war on Gaza.

Hochstein’s latest visit may indicate that the stratagem has succeeded in part. But the fact that he did not visit Beirut was telling. It implied that Washington understood that it was not the Lebanese side that was causing the trouble and that it was the Israeli side that needed to back down. 

There are reports that the French envoy, former foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, is planning another visit to Beirut to do what Hochstein did not. While the decision on this remains pending, Netanyahu clearly intends to take advantage of the remaining weeks until the US presidential elections in November to keep up the blackmail on the Western powers.

His aim is to change the military playing board, not to end military hostilities. The US, for its part, is unable to exert serious pressure on Tel Aviv, especially in an election season when Washington cannot afford to appear soft on the defence of Israel.

So, for the coming period, threatening Lebanon will remain an Israeli ruse even if it cannot act on its threat.

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