Lebanon|According to the researcher, the intensified attacks by Israel and Hezbollah towards each other are a continuation of the situation a year ago.
Israel and Hezbollah, an extremist organization based in Lebanon, have fired at each other with force over the weekend.
Hezbollah says that it hit military targets in northern Israel with rockets on the night between Saturday and Sunday. Israel, on the other hand, has bombed South Lebanon the hardest in over a year. The attacks continued immediately on Sunday morning. Among other things, the news agency Reuters reports on the attacks.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote on Sunday that Hezbollah had fired more than a hundred rockets at Israel during the night “in revenge for the explosions of paging devices”.
Finland Director of the Middle East Institute Susanne Dahlgren disagrees. According to him, the escalation of the rocket war between Israel and Hezbollah indicates the return of the parties to the exchange of rockets that started last October.
Rockets are fired at Israel from different countries led by Iran “axis of resistance”. Hezbollah is a central part of the resistance against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The groups do plan revenge attacks for events such as pager explosions and assassinations, says Dahlgren. However, rocket attacks and revenge attacks are not decided within the same circles of the factions. Retaliatory strikes are planned by the strategic leadership of the factions belonging to the axis of resistance, and in Iran by the country’s highest leadership, says Dahlgren.
“The circle planning revenge attacks must be very small.”
Its instead, the intensified attacks by Israel and Hezbollah are, according to Dahlgren, a continuation of the fact that Hamas and other Palestinian extremist organizations attacked Israel on October 7 last year and Israel started the war in Gaza.
The very day after the attack, Hezbollah started rocket attacks on Israel. Since then, shots have been regularly exchanged in the border zones between Israel and Lebanon. They want to speed up the end of the war in Gaza.
On its Telegram channel, Hezbollah said it directed the weekend’s attacks on the Ramat David air base in response to “Israel’s repeated attacks on Lebanon.”
About a week ago, Israel’s war cabinet and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the focus of the war and the fight against Hezbollah will shift to the northern part of Israel near Lebanon.
Smoke billowed from Jabal al-Rihan in Lebanon on Saturday.
Are you Hezbollah and Israel at war after the firing on both sides intensified in recent days?
In a way, yes, says Dahlgren. However, Hezbollah and other Iranian-allied factions do not want to go to war in the traditional sense.
“It’s a question of keeping Israel busy so that it doesn’t have time to do bad things in Gaza.”
Israel, on the other hand, is trying to destroy Hezbollah’s rocket launch pads.
To Hezbollah and Israel’s tense situation would be eased by a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Hezbollah has announced that it will stop the rocket attacks at the point when a cease-fire is reached in Gaza and through that a truce.”
However, the situation is complicated by the fact that the ceasefire negotiations between Hamas and Israel are currently “completely stuck”, as Dahlgren describes.
“
“Israel is kept busy so that it doesn’t have time to do bad things in Gaza.”
The stalemate in the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire talks is also holding back the border situation between Israel and Lebanon.
There is a border zone on the border between Israel and Lebanon, from where Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged shots. The zone is to be demilitarized. There is a UN resolution to promote the matter.
According to the United States, the border agreement between Israel and Lebanon could be advanced if a favorable situation for the Palestinians living in Gaza was reached in the ceasefire negotiations, says Dahlgren.
#Lebanon #Researcher #accelerated #attacks #Israel #busy #time #bad #Gaza
