– The situation is very unstable and very little is needed before it gets completely out of control, says senior advisor and Middle East expert Kai Kverme at Landinfo to NTB.
– It is difficult for the Israeli authorities to just sit quietly without being able to protect their own population, he points out a day after the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel escalated further.
On Saturday, a soccer field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was hit by a rocket attack that killed twelve people who were under 20 years old. The Druze are an Arabic-speaking religious minority that lives in both Israel, Syria and Lebanon.
The attack was the deadliest attack on Israel since the Hamas attack last October,
Attacks inside Lebanon
On Sunday morning, the Israeli army stated that it had attacked Hezbollah targets “deep inside Lebanese territory and in southern Lebanon” with aircraft.
– The Hezbollah attack today exceeds all red lines, and our response will be corresponding, said Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Sunday night.
A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, for his part, warned against Israel again entering Lebanon. Israel entered Lebanon with ground forces in 2006 at the latest.
Kverme puts the original rocket attack in the context of Hezbollah’s stated goal of tying up as much as possible of the capacity of the Israeli army in the north. But Saturday’s attack is “something different from what we have seen before”, he states, referring to significant civilian casualties.
– Hezbollah is balancing on a knife’s edge. Suddenly it is too much for Israel. They are playing with fire to the highest degree, he says.
Increased risk of war
– Before this latest attack and retaliation, many people thought that there was around a 50 percent chance of a major war. Now I think the danger of a full-scale war has probably increased. But it is difficult to speculate on that. There are many factors that must be taken into account, says Kverme.
He also emphasizes that there is reason to believe that it was not Hezbollah’s intention in the first place for the rocket – which according to the IDF was one of at least 30 rockets fired at Israel – to hit Majdal Shams and hit as it did. Hezbollah denies being behind the attack.
US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken also stated on Sunday that everything indicates that the rocket was from Hezbollah.
Hezbollah initially said the organization had fired at a military installation, but later denied the attack after seeing the results, according to Kverme. The attack is said to have been retaliation for an Israeli attack on villages in southern Lebanon earlier in the day in which four Hezbollah members were killed.
– We are not there yet
– On the one hand, Israel says that Hezbollah has crossed a red line, but at the same time they say that “we are approaching” a full-scale war. It indicates that we are not there yet, says Kverme.
Hezbollah is “completely organically connected” and almost a part of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he points out. An Israeli invasion that threatens Hezbollah’s existence could cause Iran to intervene, Kverme believes. He still finds it difficult to imagine a direct Iranian intervention in the conflict and does not think the country will intervene “as things are now”.
Israel, for its part, is tied up in the war on the Gaza Strip and in conflict with the Houthis in Yemen. A full-scale war against Hezbollah will open another front.
– We will see what Israel chooses to do. There are limits to how much they can live with. There is a lot of the population in the north who have fled and are not allowed to return, and you are constantly exposed to attacks there, says Kverme.
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2024-07-29 07:10:40
