RSS
Biden Administration Urges Israel to Tone Down Response to Hezbollah Aggression in Bid to Avert Wider Conflict
Mourners carry a coffin during the funeral of Wissam Tawil, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces who according to Lebanese security sources was killed during an Israeli strike on south Lebanon, in Khirbet Selm, Lebanon, Jan. 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher
The Biden administration has been pushing the Israeli government to de-escalate hostilities with Hezbollah to prevent a full-scale war from breaking out along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where the powerful Iran-backed terrorist group wields significant political and military influence.
In Israel’s north, Hezbollah terrorists have been firing rockets at Israel daily from southern Lebanon since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, leading Israeli forces to strike back. Tensions have been escalating between both sides, fueling concerns that the conflict in Gaza — the Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas, another Iran-backed Islamist terrorist group, to Israel’s south — could escalate into a regional conflict.
More than 80,000 Israelis evacuated Israel’s north in October and have since been unable to return to their homes. The majority of those spent the past eight months residing in hotels in safer areas of the country. The mass displacement has ramped up pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to find a swift resolution to the situation.
The ongoing conflict between both sides escalated on Tuesday when senior Hezbollah commander Taleb Sami Abdullah was killed in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah responded by launching over 200 missiles into northern Israel.
During Abdullah’s funeral, senior Hezbollah official Hachem Saffieddine vowed that the terrorist group would intensify its strikes on Israel.
“Our response after the martyrdom of Abu Taleb will be to intensify our operations in severity, strength, quantity and quality,” Saffieddine said. “Let the enemy wait for us in the battlefield.”
In Israel, meanwhile, officials have said they prefer a diplomatic solution to the current crisis but are prepared to escalate military action to push Hezbollah back from the border in order to allow internally displaced Israelis to return home. Polling has shown that the majority of the Israeli public wants the military to engage in expanded actions against the Lebanese terrorist group, which is committed to Israel’s destruction.
The Biden administration has been advising Netanyahu against pursuing the idea of a “limited war” against Hezbollah, arguing that it could spark a regional war throughout the Middle East. According to multiple reports, US officials have warned Israel that Iran could dispatch militants from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen into Lebanon to bolster Hezbollah’s effort.
The White House has also expressed concern that Israeli officials do not have a clear strategy on how to keep the war contained to solely Lebanon. Fear of a broader regional war has intensified the Biden administration’s urgency to finalize a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, which launched the ongoing war in Gaza by slaughtering over 1,200 people throughout southern Israel and kidnapping more than 250 others on Oct. 7.
“We are concerned about an increase in activity in the north. We don’t want this to escalate to a broad regional conflict and we urge de-escalation,” a Pentagon spokesperson told reporters this week.
The Pentagon also released a statement saying that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and his US counterpart Lloyd Austin discussed efforts to “de-escalate tensions along the Israel-Lebanon border in the wake of Lebanese Hezbollah’s increased aggression.”
According to multiple reports, Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to US President Joe Biden for energy and investment, will head to Israel on Monday in an effort to temper tensions between the Jewish state and Hezbollah. Hochstein will meet with Netanyahu and Gallant with the goal of swaying them against green-lighting a “limited ground invasion” in Lebanon. Hochstein will reportedly also journey to Beirut to conduct discussions with Lebanese officials.
“There was a lot of work, diplomatic work done behind the scenes by several folks in the US administration, working with regional powers and our allies to try and tamp this down,” Hochstein has said regarding the prospect of a regional war erupting in the Middle East.
Hochstein argued that preventing a large-scale war between Israel and Lebanon requires “active engagement” with both parties and for the public of both countries to “understand the risks” of further escalation. He added that “despite the bravado talk” coming from government officials, Lebanese people do not to go to war with Israel.
“The bottom line is a lot of civilians will die,” Hochstein said.
Despite chest-thumping by Hezbollah leaders, experts believe that the elimination of Abdullah might cause Hezbollah to exercise caution in engaging further with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“The powerful elimination worries Hezbollah members. They now understand that the IDF knows much more about them than we do,” Professor Amatzia Baram told The Jerusalem Post. “Additionally, the operation indicates that Hezbollah’s field security is not airtight and that the organization’s intelligence system has been penetrated to such an extent that we were able to eliminate such an important sector commander. The IDF managed to infiltrate their networks and systems and identify the right people for elimination.”
The post Biden Administration Urges Israel to Tone Down Response to Hezbollah Aggression in Bid to Avert Wider Conflict first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Benjamin Netanyahu was burned in effigy on the streets of Montreal during a Friday night riot
Justin Trudeau condemned for subsequently attending a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto.
The post Benjamin Netanyahu was burned in effigy on the streets of Montreal during a Friday night riot appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
RSS
Report: IDF targets Hezbollah chief in Beirut
Illustrative. Smoke billows over Beirut’s southern suburbs after an Israeli strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Hadath, Lebanon October 19, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
JNS.org – A massive explosion in a building in Beirut on Saturday killed 11 people and wounded dozens in what Arab media said was a failed Israeli attempt to kill Hezbollah’s head of operations, Muhammad Haydar.
Israel did not immediately claim responsibility specifically for the explosion early on Saturday in the eight-story building in the Lebanese capital’s Basta neighborhood. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said only that Israel struck an unspecified target in Beirut, the fourth strike in the city in a week.
Basta is situated in the city’s center. The bulk of Israel’s strikes in Beirut have been in the Dahiyeh neighborhood, a Hezbollah stronghold in the city’s south.
Lebanese media reported that at least 63 people were wounded in the strike.
Avihai Edraei, the head of the Arabic-language department of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, posted a tweet on X on Saturday calling on residents of Dahiyeh to evacuate their homes. They are living near Hezbollah installations, he said, against which “the IDF will act in the near future.”
The targets of Saturday’s strikes “were located by Hezbollah in the heart of the civilian population. Prior to the attack, many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians,” the IDF wrote in a statement. A headquarters, a weapons depot, “and additional Hezbollah terror infrastructures” were attacked, the statement said.
According to Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, Israel has killed 2,450 terrorists in Lebanon and Syria. Lebanese health authorities said that 3,365 people have died in strikes by Israel. Those data do not distinguish between terrorists and civilians. On the Israeli side, terrorists have killed 121 people, with 76 of them being soldiers.
The post Report: IDF targets Hezbollah chief in Beirut first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Troubling Details Emerge About Disappearance of Chabad Rabbi, Inaction of UAE Authorities
Zvi Kogan. Photo: LinkedIn via i24 News
i24 News – i24NEWS learned chilling details about the disappearance of Chabad emissary Zvi Kogan, who went missing last week in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Kogan did not show up for scheduled meetings he had during the day. After he failed to make contact, his wife contacted the security officer of the Chabad house, who alerted the local authorities. Information about the incident was also shared with the Israeli authorities.
Kogan disappeared from a location about an hour and a half from Dubai. i24NEWS can report that complaints were made to both the Dubai Police and the Abu Dhabi Police on Thursday, yet no actions were taken by either.
i24NEWS also became privy to the information that although Kogan’s car got a speeding ticket on its way to Oman, in this case too the authorities in the Emirates and Oman did nothing.
i24NEWS can also confirm that there is tremendous anger in Israel at the Emiratis, who did not respond to the suspicious signs and did not act in time. In fact, actions were only taken after the intervention of Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.
The story has troubling echoes of the abduction by Iranians of German-Iranian dissident Jamshid Sharmahd; he was kidnapped from Dubai to Iran via Oman and was eventually executed.
The post Troubling Details Emerge About Disappearance of Chabad Rabbi, Inaction of UAE Authorities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login