Triggering a region-wide war
Hezbollah can no longer sustain its policy of self-restraint
Israel’s flattening of a residential building in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, which killed 13 people including senior Hezbollah figures Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmad Wehbeh, will go down in history as the trigger of a region-wide war on multiple fronts.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah was typically candid in his speech on Thursday when he described the earlier Israeli cyber-attack using explosive communications devices as a harsh and major blow. He is sure to see the Dahiyeh bombing two days later, and the martyrdom of the two top commanders of the Radwan Force, as an even graver and more challenging development — not just for Hezbollah, but the entire Resistance Axis and its operational command in Tehran.
If Israeli claims that the targeted commanders were meeting to plan an incursion into the Galilee are true, a combined retaliatory military response by Hezbollah and other allied resistance groups may well be imminent. There are two main reasons to expect this.
First, Nasrallah has previously spoken of a ‘Tel Aviv for Dahiyeh equation’, meaning that any Israeli attack on the southern suburbs would be answered with missile strikes against Tel Aviv.
Secondly, the leadership of the resistance in Lebanon has come to the conviction that its measured policy of self-restraint and strategic patience has reached its limit. They achieved what was intended of them, and the time has come to move to a deterrent response and immediate retaliation for all Israeli attacks and security beaches. That involves striking at the Israeli interior, along with implementing the second option of ground offensives to liberate the Golan Heights and Galilee.
This explains the deployment of US aircraft carriers and warships to the Eastern Mediterranean in readiness for an expansion of the war and the start of the anticipated resistance offensive from Lebanon.
I have said this repeatedly: Netanyahu, defeated on all fronts, wants to expand the war and bring the US into it, especially against Iran as the mover and mastermind of the Resistance Axis and its component groups. His provocative cyber-escalation and continued war of assassinations in Lebanon is in speeded-up pursuit of this strategy ahead of the US presidential and legislative elections.
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