Without alluding to possible pressure from Washington, Israel has lowered the tone of its refusal after slamming the door on Thursday on the diplomatic initiative led by the United States and France that seeks a 21-day ceasefire between that country and Hezbollah. More conciliatory than the day before, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now says that the authorities of his country have been working together these days with the promoters of that initiative in which they plan to continue participating these days. Without reducing the tension with the Lebanese Shiite party-militia, the announcement from New York by the Israeli president also coincides with the launch of a new missile from Yemen on the outskirts of Tel Aviv that has been intercepted before reaching that area where At dawn, the alarms went off.
“Israel shares the goals of the US-led initiative to allow people along our northern border to safely return to their homes. “Israel appreciates the United States’ efforts in this regard because the United States’ role is indispensable in promoting stability and security in the region,” states a note from the prime minister’s office. It refers, as it has been insisting for days, to the 60,000 Israelis evacuated during the war from around the border with Lebanon, the closest five-kilometer strip, and who have been in hotels, rental houses or hosted by relatives in different places for months. regions of the country.
The Israeli twist has come with Netanyahu already installed in New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly and where there have been some riots in front of his hotel due to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. From there, the Jewish State has retraced Thursday’s harsh announcement in which the prime minister stated that he had not even responded to the proposal and that the order to his troops was to continue hitting the enemy “with all their strength.”
This Friday’s statement reveals that, at the same time that Netanyahu was attacking the diplomatic initiative, his collaborators were meeting this Thursday to promote it. “Earlier this week, the United States shared with Israel its intention to present, along with other international and regional partners, a ceasefire proposal in Lebanon. Our teams met [el jueves 26 de septiembre] to discuss the US initiative and how we can advance the shared goal of returning people safely to their homes. We will continue these conversations in the coming days,” adds the note from Netanyahu’s office.
Both Washington and Paris had not wanted to consider the work done lost despite the difficulty of reducing tension and silencing the guns. White House security spokesman John Kirby has assured that “Israel has been thoroughly informed of every word” of the truce proposal. For his part, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, pointed out that “it would be a mistake for the prime minister [Netanyahu] reject it because it would be responsible for further regional escalation.”
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Israel attributes the announced change of position to the “large amount of misinformation” that had been spread, according to the statement. Apparently, it refers to the dust that Israel’s announced refusal of the diplomatic initiative had generated on the international scene at a time when fears of a possible land invasion of Lebanon by its army have multiplied. In fact, the army itself has announced the mobilization of thousands of troops from Gaza to the north and is carrying out preparatory maneuvers while punishing the neighboring country with intense bombardments from the air. Hezbollah, for its part, continues to launch dozens of projectiles every day towards different regions of Israel that are almost always intercepted amidst the danger warnings of the alarms, like this Friday from early in the morning.
This land incursion into Lebanese territory, about which the Israeli military commanders themselves have been speculating for days, would greatly complicate the plans to stop the hostilities and, in addition, would open a question in parallel to the operation they are carrying out in Gaza. Once the troops advance, beyond the large number of victims expected on both sides, how and when to leave? How and when to end this invasion? The Israeli army, after several previous skirmishes, entered Gaza definitively on October 27, three weeks after the war began. Almost a year and more than 41,000 deaths later, there is no sense of any intention to abandon the Strip.
Meanwhile, the Houthi militia has launched a new long-range missile towards Israel. This time, unlike attacks carried out in July and this month, Israeli anti-aircraft defenses, specifically the Arrowhave managed to intercept the projectile before it reached the airspace of the Jewish State, the army reported in a statement. The objective, as the alarm map activated by the authorities shows, was once again the area around the city of Tel Aviv, the large city on the Mediterranean coast. There are no victims nor have communications been affected at the Ben Gurion airport, an essential communications hub in the country, located in that same area.
A drone launched by the Houthis hit a Tel Aviv building in July, killing one of its neighbors. Later, on September 15, they launched a missile that they themselves announced as supersonic ballistic. It did not cause any fatalities, but for the first time it managed to penetrate to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, which the rebels consider their main objective.
The last Hezbollah leader killed by Israel, Muhammad Hussein Srour, during a bombing over Beirut this Thursday, was precisely responsible for launching rockets and drones from Yemen towards Israeli territory and returned from that country to Lebanon three days ago, according to the network. Qatari Al Arabiya. In 2016, the channel showed a video in which Srour appears while training members of the Houthi guerrilla to attack Saudi Arabia. The army has killed him after considering him responsible for the air operations of the pro-Iranian militia in Lebanon.
The missile launched from Yemen early Friday was shot down by one of the three layers of Israel’s air defense systems. Specifically, the well-known system Arrowcapable of operating against missiles that fly outside the atmosphere and which is the furthest shield from the territory. The Jewish State also has an intermediate layer, the system David’s Sling (David’s sling), to stop ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as medium and long-range rockets. And finally, the best known and most frequent in its use against launches by the Palestinian resistance or Hezbollah, which is the Iron Dome (Iron Dome), for short-range rockets or artillery fire.
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