Ethan Bronner
Northern Israel is a series of ghost towns, with homes in ruins and forests burned by Hezbollah missiles, while parts of southern Lebanon have been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing, displacing tens of thousands of people from both sides.
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Since the Gaza war broke out in October, the ugly but steady tit-for-tat war between Israel and Hezbollah is escalating into something more worrying.
A record number of Hezbollah bullets have landed in Israel this month – around 900 – and Hezbollah leaders say they are overwhelmed by the number of volunteers ready to fight Israel “without any rules, restrictions or caps.” Meanwhile, Israel is waging deeper and more devastating attacks in Lebanon, where its Northern Command has just approved battle plans for the country.
While Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel say they do not want all-out war, fears have never been higher that the two countries could be drawn into or deliberately start a war. Israelis who advocate war believe such a conflict would last no more than a few weeks. Others are more pessimistic.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Arab-Israeli negotiator at the State Department, told Bloomberg TV that the Middle East could be hit by “a major regional war, high oil prices and a financial market crash.” “That's not something any of us want to see.”
Senior U.S. and French diplomats visited Jerusalem and Beirut as part of a strong effort to prevent escalation of tensions that threaten to engulf Iran and allied militias from Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as well as the United States. President Joe Biden wants to avoid a new war especially with the November elections approaching. The United States has not been in direct contact with Hezbollah but is using Lebanon's Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri as an intermediary.
The plan to end the fighting hinges on Hezbollah moving its fighters from the border. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006 after the last fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, calls for a distance of about 30 kilometers (18 miles), but negotiations have begun with 10 kilometers. International and Lebanese troops would replace the fighters and a committee would handle any disputes over the common border.
But Hezbollah maintains that the source of the current tensions is the war in Gaza, and that the solution is a ceasefire in Gaza. It claims that only once Israel and Hamas lay down their arms will Hezbollah itself enter into border negotiations.
Berri told U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein last week that the best he could do was pressure the group to de-escalate tensions by refraining from shelling Israeli territory, according to a Lebanese official briefed on the talks. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who is in Washington this week, has been urged to give diplomacy a chance and refrain from any military escalation.
Read more: Understanding the roots of the Israel-Hamas war
“Any rash action, any miscalculation could reach far beyond borders and trigger catastrophes that are frankly unimaginable,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last week. “Let me be clear: the people of the region, and the people of the world, cannot accept that Lebanon becomes another Gaza.”
The parallels with Gaza are inevitable and real. Hamas and Hezbollah, which the US considers terrorist organisations, are strongly backed by Iran. Both consider Israel illegitimate and their conflict with Israel a sacred and existential issue. Just as Hamas in Gaza was born in the 1980s as a militant movement against the Israeli occupation, so too was Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But a key difference means a war with Hezbollah would be even more devastating.
The group is far more important to Iran than Hamas, and as shocking as the Oct. 7 Hamas attack was to Israel, Hezbollah has a much stronger military presence.
After 18 years of intensive preparation, Israel has massed perhaps 100,000 troops and possessed 150,000 rockets and missiles (about half of which can reach Israel's major cities), as well as a growing arsenal of attack drones.
Israel's prized air defense systems, Iron Dome, Catapult and Arrow, will be overwhelmed by Hezbollah attacks that are expected to involve 3,000 rockets fired daily for several weeks, especially if other militias from Syria, Iraq and Yemen join in. Power plants, offshore gas rigs, military bases, airports and thousands of civilians will be at risk, as drone footage released by Hezbollah last week of key targeted facilities showed.
The pressure on the economy will be immense: Israel's Finance Ministry's chief economist predicts that a rise in the reserve army and disruptions to infrastructure and education will likely cause GDP growth to fall to minus 1.5% from the current 1.9%, and further lower the country's credit rating.
On the other side of the border, the situation will be even more dire and a much more dire situation will begin.
Neighborhoods in southern Lebanon's villages, including Aita al-Shaab, Aitaloun and Qiyam, have been devastated by Israeli airstrikes, forcing thousands to flee and straining an economy still recovering from a financial crisis four years ago when the country defaulted on eurobonds for the first time and its currency collapsed.
After the 2006 war ended after 34 days, Arab Gulf states pledged billions of dollars in aid to help Lebanon rebuild infrastructure including airports, ports, communications towers, power plants and bridges along the 140-kilometer (90-mile) border with Israel.
The Lebanese people have no interest in fighting again, which would bring more casualties and irreparable damage. Today, the Middle East is very different. Saudi Arabia, once a major donor with great influence in Lebanese politics, has lost interest, and Shiite Islamists, led by Hezbollah, have become an invincible force in the country.
“I don't believe any of the potential belligerents actually want war or an escalation of conflict,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week, but echoed Guterres' comments that miscalculation or misunderstanding could spark war.
Beyond diplomats, the Biden administration has also sought to head off a broader conflict by using supply chains to delay arms deliveries to Israel and has promised aid to Israel if war breaks out, though it has stopped short of pledging full support.
In fact, Israel does not intend to open a second front until it has completed its military operation against Hamas in Gaza, which could take several weeks or months.
But Israelis view the Hezbollah rocket and missile barrage as a genuine act of aggression, so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to find broad public support for his threats to risk everything to drive Hezbollah away from the border.
“There's a lot of tension going on right now between Hezbollah and the Israeli government, but that doesn't mean it won't escalate into something much more serious,” Hagar Shemari, founder of Greenwich Media Strategies, a Connecticut-based geopolitical consultancy, told Bloomberg TV on June 21. “We're going to see a significant escalation of tensions this summer.”
