The detonation of hundreds of pagers, and dozens of walkie-talkies, used by Hezbollah leaders and associates across Lebanon, killing at least 20 and injuring 450, was a daring and high-risk attack by Israel. Some might call it foolhardy, because it opens the prospect of Israel now having to handle war on three fronts and an enraged Iran prepared to fight on even more — from Africa to southern and central Europe.
It is a situation in which the international club — the Nato and EU allies principally — appear to have declining leverage. Their leaders seem increasingly confused — and seem to be telling us that the strategic implications of what is going on in Israel, Lebanon and the region once called the Levant, and the deepening crisis in the Ukraine war, are being parked in the “too difficult” box next to their in-trays.
A symptom of this was the summit that never was between Joe Biden and his foreign affairs team and Sir Keir Starmer and his team at the White House last week. Allegedly they were to decide on letting Ukraine use air-launched British, French and Italian Storm Shadow missiles to strike into Russia to prevent reinforcements and supplies getting to the main battle fronts around Kursk, just inside Russia, and the Donetsk salient in Ukraine.
Simple question, simple answer you might think. At the end of the meeting there was no announcement — and I don’t think this was bowing to the threats by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s highly emotional deputy Sergei Medvedev that if Ukraine used deep-strike weapons, the consequences would be dire and unpredictable, Russia would be at war with Nato. Yet he often says such things — and as for war with Nato, the Russians are struggling to best an army and nation about a third their size and strength. If Putin did try to use tactical nuclear weapons, China would cancel him.
After Washington, Sir Keir Starmer’s silence said it all — his indecision is final. There is a suspicion that he and his Chancellor haven’t signed off on the long-term contracts for ammunition, and the necessary components, to restock the arsenals of the British Army, let alone provide rockets for Ukraine.
Top of the agenda now is what happens in Israel and Lebanon and what Hezbollah and Iran are likely to do
Top of the agenda now is what happens in Israel and Lebanon and what Hezbollah and Iran are likely to do. The communications sabotage operation was long-planned and executed — suggesting the authorship of the elite Israeli surveillance unit known as Military Unit 8200 — responsible for subversions and assassinations inside Iran to thwart the nuclear programme — as well as the foreign intelligence service Mossad.
The communications attack seems to have been a preliminary move to a major operation for Israeli forces, land air and sea, to move into Lebanon to push the Hezbollah militias well back from the border.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has recently declared that clearing and securing the Lebanon border is a main war aim for Israel now. Since October 8, the day after the Hamas massacre of 1,400 Israelis, Hezbollah has shelled and rocketed northern Israel. Dozens have been injured and killed — including 12 young people at a sports ground in a Druze village in the Golan Heights. Israel has steadily returned fire — resulting in 539 being killed in south Lebanon, according to Lebanese health authorities. Netanyahu says the ground must be cleared so that the 60,000 Israelis forced to evacuate last year, can return to their homes.
Israeli forces have moved into Lebanon several times over the past half-century on the same pretext of making the border safe. They pushed beyond the Litani river in 1978, went as far as Beirut in 1982, only to withdraw entirely in 2000. Six years later came the latest war between Israel and Hezbollah across southern Lebanon. That didn’t end well for either party — but it did lead to Iran arming Hezbollah with a new arsenal. They have 150,000 rockets and other missiles, making them the best armed militia in the region.
Today Netanyahu is committed to war in three areas — Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. None of these is near any kind of resolution — in Gaza, despite the mass demolition campaign, Hamas is not defeated. At home he is increasingly isolated from most of his war cabinet colleagues — and the latest row with defence minister Yoav Gallant has been embarrassingly public.
The continuing war postures of both Netanyahu and Putin are increasingly toxic — because they carry the explicit promise that the wars in Europe and the Middle East are expanding. That affects us all.
Indecision by western allies is not the least, but the worst of options — it could become an excuse for letting things get out of control.
