The war the Israelis are waging in Gaza in retaliation to a Hamas strike on October 7 is just a bomb or two away from conflagrating into a full-scale regional war involving the Hezbollah based in Lebanon. Israel struck targets in Lebanon on Saturday night in response to a rocket attack from Lebanon that killed 12 kids and teenagers playing soccer in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in Israel-occupied Golan Heights.
Hezbollah may have been acting coy in not claiming the reprehensible attack on children though it was all but confirmed that the rocket came from Lebanon, according to the US secretary of state. Its strike on the Golan Heights represented the worst attack on civilians in Israel since the October 7 outrage. But it is not as if Israel has been respecting the lives of private citizens of whom it has taken a toll in thousands in its bombardment of the Gaza Strip for eight months now.
No one seems to want to stop this blood-curdling war in the Middle East in which civilian deaths are nearly 40,000 — not Israel, thirsting for revenge and defying world opinion in indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, not the military wing of Hamas that seems to stop short of pursuing several ceasefire proposals to the end, nor even the backers of Hezbollah who are Iran’s proxies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who cut short his Washington visit by several hours to attend a security cabinet meeting at home, is another whose political career is hanging on the war continuing. The day a ceasefire is agreed upon and hostages swapped by both sides, his usefulness as a war hawk might be over with the Israelis ready to vote him out.
Threatening to escalate the situation by making Hezbollah “pay like never before”, Netanyahu is acting true to his playbook. A promising ceasefire proposal that was backed by the US leaders he met in Washington may have been shredded already. The meeting in Rome of US, Egypt and Qatar officials on Sunday to push for the Gaza ceasefire may have been ill-timed.
