Before going to New York, where he is expected this Friday at the UN General Assembly, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the 21-day truce proposal presented by the United States and France. “I asked the IDF to continue fighting until we achieve our goal,” Netanyahu said. What this objective is remains to be determined: officially, Israel would be content to expel Hezbollah from the border to avoid bombings on the Galilee and so that expelled civilians can return home.
Today, it seems that the scale of the attacks and the care taken in their planning suggest something more. IDF Chief Herzi Halevi made this clear on Thursday with the following words: “The army has been waiting for years for such an opportunity to attack Hezbollah”. It therefore does not seem to be a circumstantial operation, but rather a decapitation of Hezbollah and the transformation of what was the reference militia of Islamic terrorism into a minor threat, which would mean for Iran, Israel’s great enemy in the Middle East.
Indeed, this Thursday, attacks continued against southern Lebanon and its capital, Beirut. The Israeli military has claimed responsibility for the death of Mohammad Hussein Surur, head of Hezbollah’s air force, although the terrorist group has not yet confirmed it. The attack on Hussein Surur It would be the fourth against senior Hezbollah leaders in just over a week. Recall that after the wave of explosions of locators and walkie talkiesthe organization had already been seriously affected at all levels, with dozens of deaths and hundreds of injured.
“Escalate to defuse”
Given this situation, the possibility of Israel agreeing to any type of truce seems very remote. He has no reason for this. It carried out the largest military intelligence operation in years, accompanied by a series of bombings unprecedented since the First Lebanon War in the 1980s. They eliminated leaders, deactivated middle managers and carried out undermining Hezbollah’s communications capacity. This is not an opportunity Netanyahu will pass up easily, without the need to undertake a ground operation, which remains to be decided.
Although American diplomatic sources consulted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz claim that Netanyahu initially accepted the offer, but that pressure from his ultra-Orthodox partners made him return, the truth is that this explanation is already well known. It is the same one that the Prime Minister has disclosed before every decisive action in Gaza.. It seems clear at this stage that the operation against Hezbollah has been planned for too long to depend on the political expediency of the moment and that, of course, it has the direct support of the Prime Minister.
With the situation in Gaza under control and attempts to find other hostages in the Gaza Strip suspended indefinitely, after a year of fruitless searching, Israel has the opportunity to deal a double blow to Hamas and Hezbollah, guaranteeing their security for a considerable period. time. At least that’s what they think in Tel Aviv. The United States insists on the contrary, that any non-negotiated solution to these conflicts leads to more serious conflicts in the future and that Israel’s concept of ‘escalation to deescalate’ rarely ends well.
Nasrallah’s motivations
The problem is that, as we also saw in Gaza, Israel listens to the United States, but has no desire to obey it. From the first moment, Netanyahu made it clear to Biden that he made his own decisions and Public confrontations between the two administrations are notorious. Israel will not allow Hezbollah to reorganize and rearm now that its militias are being hit on all fronts… just as it did not allow Hamas to do so when the international community insisted on a ceasefire -fire before the IDF entry into Khan Yunis and later into Rafah.
That said, there are also serious doubts whether Hezbollah would have accepted the Western offer. Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly said since last week’s attacks that he does not intend to stop launching projectiles into northern Israel and that, sooner or later, he will make the Jewish state pay for its actions. Iran, sponsor of the terrorist group, expressed itself in very similar terms: the intention is to fight until there is a ceasefire in Gaza and Israeli troops leave the area. band. It is a commitment that Nasrallah himself made just after October 7 and he knows that his image, in front of the Lebanese and in front of the Iranian Resistance Axis in general, is at stake.
Yeah Yahya Sinwar He refuses to give up the place with a decimated organization, a devastated population and an existence limited to the tunnels which take him from one cache to another, It would be strange if Nasrallah agreed to a ceasefire. He has already had to go back on his promise that he would declare war on Israel if Israel entered the Gaza Strip, and two such curbs in such a short time would only be acceptable if the orders came directly from Tehran. And in Tehran, they now seem too busy sending missiles to Russia to help them in their war against Ukraine, hoping that one day this help will be appreciated in return.
