Israel's war in Gaza threatens to spill into Lebanon and beyond [View all]

[Celerity]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/27/israel-lebanon-gaza-hamas-palestinians/

https://archive.is/PC0kX



TEL AVIV — Escalating strikes and counterstrikes along the border between Israel and Lebanon are raising fears of a possible new front for Israel, even as its fighters remain mired in bloody urban combat in Gaza to the south in its campaign to destroy Hamas. Hezbollah fired more barrages at northern Israel on Wednesday in the latest in a string of attacks by Iranian-backed groups across the Middle East against Israeli and U.S. assets.

Hezbollah has lobbed scores of rockets and explosives-laden drones at Israel this week, including at a Greek Orthodox church, where two Israeli Christians were wounded. Drones targeted the Egyptian resort city of Dahab in the Sinai Peninsula, the second such incident there in the past month. There was an explosion outside the Israeli Embassy in India’s capital, New Delhi. And an airstrike near Syria’s capital, Damascus, killed a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The group has vowed that Israel will “pay.”

“We are now at a fork in the road,” Eylon Levy, spokesman for the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday. “Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with U.N. Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves.” “Hezbollah and its Iranian warlord patrons are dragging Lebanon into a totally unnecessary war, into the war that Hamas started,” Levy said. “Our region does not deserve a broader war.”

On Tuesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was in “a multifront war,” in which the country had been attacked from “seven arenas” — Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran — and had responded in six. Israeli media reported that Israel has not yet acted in Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have for weeks been firing missiles at Israel and at commercial vessels at sea, disrupting international shipping routes.

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