Middle East | Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel, Israel hit Beirut – Is the Middle East sliding to the brink of full-scale war?

Israel and the extremist organization Hezbollah drifted ever closer to open war as Israel pounded Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon on Thursday.

On Friday afternoon Finnish time, Hezbollah said it had fired 140 rockets into northern Israel. British Broadcasting Corporation the BBC according to the organization said that it targeted military targets. The Jerusalem Post – magazine reported that Israel had destroyed more than a thousand ready-to-launch rockets in the extensive airstrikes that started in southern Lebanon on Thursday.

Israel is said to have struck Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, on Friday. According to local media quoted by the Reuters news agency, people were both killed and wounded in the attack, but the numbers were not immediately certain. Reuters says that according to security sources, the target of the attack would have been a high-ranking member of Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has assured that he will take revenge for what happened earlier this week, the hacking of thousands of pagers and radio phones of members of the extremist organization explosions. Dozens of people died and thousands were injured in the attacks.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah stated in a speech on Thursday that the organization considers the bombings a declaration of war on Israel, which will be severely retaliated against.

Leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which supports Hezbollah Hossein Salami in turn said on Thursday that Israel will face a “crushing response from the axis of the revolution”.

“We will witness the destruction of this bloodthirsty and criminal regime”, Salami had promised in his message to Nasrallah, according to Iranian state media by.

According to the Reuters news agency, the United States and Britain appealed to the parties to refrain from expanding the war. So did the UN’s Unifil peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.

Because Israel’s actions have been both startling and powerful, it is worth asking: has the country already launched an open war against Hezbollah?

Senior researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute Timo R. Stewart says Israel may launch its wider war quietly, as it did when it attacked the Gaza-based extremist group Hamas in October last year.

Hamas was first crushed by airstrikes, then special forces were sent to Gaza, and only later did the situation turn into a full ground attack. Whether something like this is going on against Hezbollah will only become clear later.

“It’s not going to start with them blowing the trumpet and going over the border with tanks. The key question is when will we get to the point where the Israeli leadership has stated that we are now going to end these Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon,” says Stewart.

Stewart’s According to the report, the surest sign that Hezbollah is ready for a full-scale war against Israel would be harnessing the organization’s missile arsenal to attack Israeli cities.

“Because of Israel’s missile defenses, they would probably have to fire a very large number of rockets, missiles and drones at once to get something through,” says Stewart.

Hezbollah started firing rockets into the northern parts of Israel after Israel took revenge for the attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7 last year. Israel has responded to the rockets with its own strikes, but it has been about “low-intensity” warfare.

Tens of thousands of people have had to flee the border area, on both sides. On Monday of this week, Israel announced that its war goals now include allowing Israelis to return to their homes in the northern parts of the country.

in Israel and Hezbollah both have internal and external disincentives to engage in full-scale war.

In addition to being a military organization, Hezbollah is also a political party that has to fear for its support in Lebanon, which is ravaged by economic hardship.

In addition, Iran has been considered to want to avoid a war in which Israel would attack Hezbollah with full force, because it could drag Iran into the war as well.

The United States, on the other hand, has tried to influence Israel, which it generously supports, so that an attack on Lebanon would not start a regional war, in which the United States would perhaps have to get involved more directly than at present.

According to Stewart, the US’s wishes and demands for Israel during the past year have not, however, held Israel back in its war against Hamas operating in Gaza.

in Israel polls have been somewhat fluctuating regarding the extent to which there is support for the war against Hezbollah. However, according to Stewart, war is now popular.

Minister of Defense in the Government of Israel Yoav Gallant has said that Hamas has been destroyed as a military organization and that Gaza has shifted to fighting the enemy with guerilla tactics.

Recently, dreams have been entertained that Israel and Hamas would reach an agreement on a ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners. Hezbollah has said that a ceasefire would make it stop rocket attacks on Israel.

“Now there seems to be no desire for a ceasefire agreement. It is no longer clear that this war is in the interests of, say, the Israeli government. They have promised that the inhabitants of the north will get home, and it’s hard to see that happening without a ceasefire or war,” says Timo Stewart.