JERUSALEM: With Israel’s defense minister announcing a “new phase” of the war and an apparent Israeli attack setting off explosions in electronic devices in Lebanon, the specter of all-out combat between Israel and Hezbollah seems closer than ever before.
Hopes for a diplomatic solution to the conflict appear to be fading quickly as Israel signals a desire to change the status quo in the country’s north, where it has exchanged cross-border fire with Hezbollah since the Lebanese militant group began attacking on Oct. 8, a day after the war’s opening salvo by Hamas.
In recent days, Israel has moved a powerful fighting force up to the northern border, officials have escalated their rhetoric, and the country’s security Cabinet has designated the return of tens of thousands of displaced residents to their homes in northern Israel an official war goal.
Here’s a look at how Israel is preparing for a war with Lebanon:
Troops drawn from Gaza to the northern border
While the daily fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has escalated on several occasions, the bitter enemies have been careful to avoid an all-out war.
That appears to be changing — especially after pagers, walkie-talkies, solar equipment and other devices exploded in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 20 and wounding thousands in a sophisticated attack Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
“You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming,” said retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who leads Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group of hawkish former military commanders. “Why didn’t we do it for 11 months? Because we were not willing to go to war yet. What’s happening now? Israel is ready for war.”
As fighting in Gaza has slowed, Israel has fortified forces along the border with Lebanon, including the arrival this week of a powerful army division that took part in some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza.
The 98th Division is believed to include thousands of troops, including paratrooper infantry units and artillery and elite commando forces specially trained for operations behind enemy lines. Their deployment was confirmed by an official with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss troop movements.
The division played a key role in Gaza, spearheading the army’s operations in the southern city of Khan Younis, a Hamas stronghold. The offensive inflicted heavy losses on Hamas fighters and tunnels, but also wreaked massive damage, sent thousands of Palestinians fleeing and resulted in scores of civilian deaths. Israel says Hamas endangers civilians by hiding in residential areas.
The military also said it staged a series of drills this week along the border.
“The mission is clear,” said Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, who heads Israel’s Northern Command. “We are determined to change the security reality as soon as possible.”
A ‘new phase’ of war
The military movements have been accompanied by heightened rhetoric from Israel’s leaders, who say their patience is running thin.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday night declared the start of a ” new phase” of the war as Israel turns its focus toward Hezbollah. “The center of gravity is shifting to the north by diverting resources and forces,” he said.
He spoke a day after Israel’s Cabinet made the return of displaced residents to their homes in northern Israel a formal goal of the war. The move was largely symbolic — Israeli leaders have long pledged to bring those residents home. But elevating the significance of the aim signaled a tougher stance.
After meeting Wednesday with top security officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “We will return the residents of the north securely to their homes.”
Netanyahu delivered a similarly tough message with a top US envoy sent to the region this week to soothe tensions.
An official with knowledge of the encounter told The Associated Press that the envoy, Amos Hochstein, told Netanyahu that intensifying the conflict with Hezbollah would not help return evacuated Israelis back home.
Netanyahu, according to a statement from his office, told Hochstein that residents cannot return without “a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.” The statement said that while Netanyahu “appreciates and respects” US support, Israel will “do what is necessary to safeguard its security.”
Is war inevitable?
Israeli media reported Wednesday that the government has not yet decided whether to launch a major offensive in Lebanon.
Much, it seems, will depend on Hezbollah’s response. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is expected to deliver a major speech on Thursday.
But public sentiment in Israel seems to be supportive of tougher action against Hezbollah.
A recent poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank, found that 67 percent of Jewish respondents thought Israel should intensify its response to Hezbollah. The majority believed Israel should launch a deep offensive that includes striking Lebanese infrastructure.
“There’s a lot of pressure from the society to go to war and win,” said Avivi, the retired general. “Unless Hezbollah tomorrow morning says, ‘OK, we got the message. We’re pulling out of south Lebanon,’ war is imminent.”
Such a war would almost certainly prove devastating to both sides.
Already, more than 500 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes since Oct. 8, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups but also more than 100 civilians. In northern Israel, at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed by strikes from Lebanon.
Israel inflicted heavy damage on Lebanon during a monthlong war against Hezbollah in 2006 that ended in a stalemate. Israeli leaders have threatened even tougher action this time around, vowing to repeat the scenes of destruction from Gaza in Lebanon.
But Hezbollah also has built up its capabilities since 2006. Hezbollah has an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, some believed to have guidance systems that could threaten sensitive targets in Israel. It has also developed an increasingly sophisticated fleet of drones.
Capable of striking all parts of Israel, Hezbollah could bring life in Israel to a standstill and send hundreds of thousands of Israelis fleeing.
A war with Hezbollah may be looming. Is Israel prepared?
https://arab.news/gqv6k
A war with Hezbollah may be looming. Is Israel prepared?
- Israeli media reported Wednesday that the government has not yet decided whether to launch a major offensive in Lebanon
‘No food, nothing’: Famine grips Sudan
- Country’s economy bludgeoned by war and mismanagement
CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.
In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.
“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.
Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.
Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.
El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.
In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.
By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.
Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.
“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”
At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.
Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.
Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.
“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.
Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.
Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.
The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.
Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.
Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones.
After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.
In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.
“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.
With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.
Jordan hospital offers injured Gazans hope for recovery
- Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild
AMMAN: Karam Nawjaa, 17, was so badly injured when an Israeli strike hit his home in Gaza nearly a year ago that his own cousin, pulling him from the rubble, did not recognize him.
After rushing Karam to hospital he returned to continue searching for his cousin all night in the rubble.
In that strike on Feb. 14, 2024, Karam lost his mother, a sister and two brothers. As well as receiving serious burns to his face and body, he lost the ability to use his arms and hands.
Now, the burns are largely healed and he is slowly regaining the use of his limbs after months of treatment at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the Jordanian capital Amman which operates a program of reconstructive surgery.
“I only remember that on that day, Feb. 14, there was a knock on our door ... I opened it, my brother came in, and after that ... (I remember) nothing,” he said.
“Before the war I was studying, and thank God, I was an outstanding student,” Karam said, adding that his dream had been to become a dentist. Now he does not think about the future.
“What happened, happened ... you feel that all your ambitions have been shattered, that what happened to you has destroyed you.”
Karam is one of many patients from Gaza being treated at Amman’s Specialized Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery, Al-Mowasah Hospital. He shares a room there with his younger sister and their father.
“All these patients are war victims ... with complex injuries, complex burns ... They need very long rehabilitation services, both surgical but also physical and mental,” said Moeen Mahmood Shaief, head of the MSF mission in Jordan.
“The stories around those patients are heartbreaking, a lot of them have lost their families” and require huge support to be reintegrated into normal life, he added.
Israel’s 15-month offensive in Gaza left the coastal enclave a wasteland of rubble that will take years to rebuild.
Displaced Palestinians have been returning to their mostly destroyed homes after a ceasefire came into effect on Jan. 19.
Leader of rebels who toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad is named country’s interim president
- Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted
- Abdul Ghani announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country
DAMASCUS: The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad last month was named on Wednesday the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with Al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule and said Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on Al-Sharaa but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, Al-Sharaa has called for creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.
Jordan’s king meets Belgian monarch in Brussels
- Parties discuss recent developments in the Middle East
- King Abdullah expresses Jordan’s commitment to enhancing partnership with EU
LONDON: The King of Jordan Abdullah II met King Philippe of Belgium in Brussels on Wednesday, accompanied by Crown Prince Hussein.
The monarchs discussed recent developments in the Middle East and stressed their commitment to supporting efforts for peace and stability in the region, the Jordan News Agency reported.
King Abdullah spoke of Jordan’s commitment to enhancing its partnership with the EU during a meeting with top European officials, including Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament; and European Council President Antonio Costa.
Jordan and the EU signed a strategic partnership on Wednesday in which the EU pledged €3 billion in financing and investments for Jordan.
In his meeting with EU officials, the Jordanian monarch affirmed his country’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories and warned of the escalation of action in the West Bank, the Jordan News Agency added.
He emphasized the importance of increasing the flow of humanitarian aid and maintaining the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which ended the 15-month conflict in Gaza.
Lebanon official media reports Israeli strike in south
- “An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house in Yohmor
BEIRUT: Lebanese official media said an Israeli strike hit south Lebanon on Wednesday, the second consecutive day to see such a raid despite a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
“An enemy drone” carried out a strike targeting a house that “had been destroyed in a previous raid” in south Lebanon’s Yohmor Al-Shaqeef, the National News Agency said.
