Israeli-Hezbollah Confrontations Heat Up in Southern Lebanon

As confrontations in southern Lebanon heat up, Israeli and Lebanese diplomats met at Rome on Thursday under American auspices. Will military escalation hurt peace talks? Israelis buried two soldiers who were killed Thursday morning, marking the first Israeli fatalities in southern Lebanon since a ceasefire there was agreed in June. At Rome, meanwhile, Israeli and Lebanese diplomats met for a seventh round of negotiations, meant to end the enmity between the two countries.Israeli press reports claim that under American demands for restraint, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to scrap a wide military escalation in response to the Thursday morning event. Washington is pressuring Israel to expand a pilot program of handing over Israeli-held sites in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese army. During the Thursday meeting at Rome, the Israelis were told by Americans that “even as we have clearly stated publicly that they have every right to defend themselves, that they can’t shoot and blow up their way to a solution,” an unidentified Washington official told I-24 News.Jerusalem insists, though, that the fight against Hezbollah in fact boosts diplomacy with Beirut. “As Israel continues to weaken Hezbollah, that creates more real opportunities to move forward,” a former close adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, Mark Regev, tells The New York Sun. “In the past, when Hezbollah was strong, the Lebanese government couldn’t have direct negotiations with Israel.” A specialized IDF unit entered a booby-trapped building in the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Zoun Thursday morning. The area is in Israeli-held territory known as the “yellow line.” Two officers were killed and four others seriously injured. In response, Israeli Jets struck Hezbollah’s “weapons storage facilities, a headquarters, and additional terrorist infrastructure,” the IDF wrote on X.“The IDF doesn’t need to ‘respond,’ it needs to keep up the effort to dismantle Hezbollah,” the founder of Alma Research, Sarit Zehavi, tells the Sun. In recent days, she says, Lebanese residents who had earlier fled the south started returning to their villages. Hiding in their midst are Hezbollah terrorists who hope to rebuild attack bases on Israel’s border. Israeli politicians of the left and right are pressuring the government to escalate in southern Lebanon even as Washington is pressuring the IDF for restraint. Israel, they argue, must maintain independence of operation against threats to its security. Mr. Netanyahu is “completely under guardianship,” a center-left politician, Yair Lapid said this week, while his party partner, former prime minister Naftali Bennett, claimed that Israel has lost its sovereignty. A right winger, Avigdor Liberman, says Mr. Netanyahu is a President Trump “puppet.” At the same time, though, many Israelis are encouraged by the American-led diplomacy, which could eventually lead to a peace treaty with a long-time enemy state. “The current momentum in Lebanon is positive, and so Israel has no interest in creating chaos,” Mr. Regev, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Britain, says. “We and the United States have a common interest in creating conditions so that Lebanon can join the circle of peace, which it clearly wants to do.”President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon is stiffening his opposition to Hezbollah even as his politics are even more complicated than Mr. Netanyahu’s. The Lebanese Armed Forces will be charged with completing the disarming of Hezbollah once Israel withdraws from Lebanon at the end of the American-sponsored peace talks. Yet the LAF is weak and many of its troops sympathize with Hezbollah.Mr. Aoun is calling to hasten Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. He and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam need to claim at least some progress in “liberating” the south in order to justify their unprecedented decision to conduct direct negotiations with Jerusalem. “The greatest help to Israel was provided by those who unilaterally drew Lebanon into the adventures of futile wars and granted it pretexts to attack our country,” Mr. Salam told Al Arabiya this week, referring to Hezbollah.Yet even now the terrorist group “has not given up its motivation to attack Israel,” Ms. Zehavi writes. In areas that are yet to be cleared by the IDF, she adds, “Hezbollah is actively and aggressively working to recover and rebuild militarily.” An Iranian proxy, Hezbollah relishes any setback to IDF troops in Lebanon, as on Thursday morning. Its goal is to reignite a full scale war, which in turn would undermine the American-led Israeli-Lebanese efforts to end their wars.

Israeli-Hezbollah Confrontations Heat Up in Southern Lebanon

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