Israel threatens to drive Hezbollah away from Lebanese border
Joel Gehrke
Video Embed
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is “next in line” on the list of Israel’s military targets, according to the Jewish state’s top diplomat, who warned the Lebanon-based terrorist to withdraw forces from Israel’s border.
“We will work to exhaust the political option, and if it does not work, all options are on the table in order to ensure the security of the State of Israel and return the residents of the north to their homes,” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said Wednesday.
DESANTIS CAMPAIGN ON THE BRINK AS IOWA CAUCUSES NEAR
Israeli and Hezbollah forces have exchanged fire on a small scale in recent months as the Gaza war ignited by Hamas’s rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7 threatens to erupt into a wider conflict between Israel and Iran’s strongest terrorist proxy. Nasrallah resisted initial pressure from Hamas to join the war, but the regular rounds of retaliatory strikes culminated this week in an Israeli attack that killed a Hezbollah fighter and two members of his family, which Hezbollah countered by firing “at least 34 rockets” into Israel, according to media figures.
“We are now at a fork in the road: Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with U.N. Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves,” I Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman, Eylon Levy, said Wednesday. “Hezbollah and its Iranian warlord patrons are dragging Lebanon into a totally unnecessary war, into the war that Hamas started. Our region does not deserve a broader war.”
That prospect has haunted U.S. and Israeli strategists since the beginning of Israel’s campaign to dismantle the terrorists who perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacres. Levy’s statement referred to the U.N. Security Council resolution that called for a buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah following a 2006 war, but Lebanon isn’t the only base of operations for Iran and its proxies. Iran said Israel killed an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general on Monday in a strike in Syria, where Iranian forces and Hezbollah have fought to preserve Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s regime.
The fraught security and diplomatic dynamics were on display in Iran’s vow of revenge for the strike as an Iranian military official claimed that Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 was actually an Iranian operation to retaliate for the killing of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general, by the United States in 2020.
“Al-Aqsa Flood was one of the acts of revenge for the assassination of General Soleimani by the US and the Zionists,” IRGC spokesman Ramezan Sharif said, per an Al Arabiya English translation. “Certainly, these acts of revenge will continue in different times and places.”
Hamas disputed that claim, and Sharif soon concurred that the Oct. 7 attack was “an entirely Palestinian operation.” If that walk-back aims to put some rhetorical distance between Iran and the Oct. 7 attack — and, by the same token, lower the risk of conflict between Iran and Israel — the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah raise the specter of a clash between Israel and Iran’s most heavily armed and strategically significant terrorist organization.
“The situation in the north must change,” said Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz, an opposition leader who formed a unity government with Netanyahu after the Oct. 7 attack. “The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out. If the world, and the Lebanese government, won’t stop the shooting towards the northern communities from Lebanon, and won’t act to remove Hezbollah from the border — the IDF will.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Cohen, the Israeli foreign minister, suggested that this prospect could be avoided if Nasrallah withdraws his forces behind the Litani River, about 18 miles from the Israeli border.
“Nasrallah should understand that he is next in line,” Cohen said. “If he doesn’t want to be next in line, he should … keep Hezbollah away from the north of Litani.”