In the midst of the intensification of threats and crossfire between Israel and Hezbollah – which have led the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to urgently send his envoy Amos Hochstein to the area to try to avoid an open war with unpredictable consequences -, The leader of the Lebanese party-militia issued a warning this Wednesday. Hasan Nasrallah has assured that he does not want a “total war”, but he will fight “without rules or limits”, by land, sea and air, and without “a single place” being safe from his missiles and drones, in case his enemy initiates it. Nasrallah has also warned Cyprus, a member of the European Union, for the first time. If the island, which is located northwest of Lebanon and has hosted military maneuvers with Israel, allowed him to use its bases to launch attacks, he would consider it “part of the war” and act accordingly.
“Yeah [Israel] starts a war against Lebanon, the issue of the Mediterranean Sea will become a completely different thing. All its coasts, all its beaches, all its ports, all its ships. AND [Israel] He knows that his army is incapable of defending itself. His army is incapable in that battle,” Nasrallah said in his televised speech, after eight months of confrontations that have resulted in a kind of low-intensity or attrition war. Hezbollah insists it will cease its attacks as soon as Israel ends the war in Gaza, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government treats them as separate fronts.
The top leader of the powerful Shiite organization – a kind of State within the State whose men, between 50,000 and 100,000, are credited with the ability to defeat the Lebanese army itself – stated that “no place” in Israel would be safe from its rockets. and drones. And he remembered that he’s not throwing them indiscriminately. “Everyone has a goal.” […] They must wait for us by land, sea and air,” he added.
Coup de effect in Haifa
The televised speech comes a day after a coup by Hezbollah. It was the dissemination of images of one of the most strategic points of the Jewish State: the port of Haifa. Located more than 30 kilometers from the border, it is the largest of the country’s three international ports, along with Ashdod and Eilat. A drone launched from Lebanon arrived there, captured the images and returned without being intercepted, according to Hezbollah.
“Nasrallah today brags about having filmed the Haifa ports, operated by international companies from China and India, and threatens to attack them. “We are very close to the moment of deciding to change the rules against Hezbollah and Lebanon,” responded Foreign Minister Israel Katz. “In an all-out war, Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be severely damaged. The State of Israel will pay a price at the front and in the rear, but with a strong, united nation and the full power of the army, we will restore security to the residents of the north,” he noted.
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Like some 94,000 Lebanese, more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the crossfire zone. The vast majority are asking to start an open war now that will allow them to return. On the 5th, Netanyahu visited the border – which registers dozens of aerial bombardments every day – in Lebanon; or explosive drones, rockets or anti-tank projectiles, in Israel― and declared: “We are prepared for very intense action.”
They already faced each other in 2006 for 34 days. Hezbollah claimed victory by resisting a much superior enemy and killing 165 Israelis (mostly soldiers), although more than a thousand Lebanese, mainly civilians, died. Today it has more arsenal and more better prepared men.
While some voices in the army and politics consider an open war inevitable to push Hezbollah’s elite forces north of the Litani River, as established by UN resolution 1701, which Israel also fails to comply with on a daily basis, a minority far-right sector sees also an opportunity to reoccupy it militarily (as happened between 1982 and 2000) permanently and build Jewish settlements there. Last week, he organized a conference on the topic. The biblical concept of the Land of Israel, to which the most ultra-nationalist Jews aspire, encompasses at least part of today’s Lebanon.
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