A new phase of the war is being declared by both Israel and Hezbollah. People on both sides are getting a taste of what that looks and feels like. Rockets and bombs rained down on both sides. Hundreds already died in Lebanon. Tens of thousands of civilians fled south of the country heading north. Hezbollah wants revenge for Israel’s attack on their commanders. and fighters, rigging pages with explosives.
Israel allegedly killed around a dozen and injured many more that way. Hezbollah wants a truce in Gaza before it stops firing rockets into Israel. And Tel Aviv answers by attacking Hezbollah in positions so that thousands of Israelis can return to their homes in the north without being targeted by Hezbollah’s rockets. And Daniel Dillen-Burmer, a journalist and expert for the Middle East at the daily newspaper, Die Welt, here in Germany.
Hezbollah is a lot more stronger than Hamas is. a situation that was similar to Gaza. But Gaza is a quagmire in a way for Israel. there could be some similar problems, but that depends on how Israel acts now. What we’re hearing these days is that Israel’s preparing for a ground offensive in Lebanon. quite sure this is really an imminent scenario, but it is a possibility. And if Israel goes in that direction, it might find itself in a quagmire in Lebanon, because that scenario.
Israeli soldiers moving in and starting a guerrilla warfare on these troops. That’s what Hezbollah has been preparing for during the past years. That’s what Hezbollah is looking for. Raheeda, for many Lebanese, this already. What will be the difference? Will it make a difference? I mean, of course it can always get much worse.
But at the moment a fallout war, but it is a fallout war. that on Monday when Israel bombarded the south of Lebanon, saying that it’s attacking artillery, you know, of Hezbollah and in other places of Lebanon, we saw over 500 people dying, that’s in one day. And this is, you know, we haven’t seen that in Lebanon for years since the end of the civil war in the 1990.
This is a massive amount of casualties to fall in one day. for a lot of Lebanese, it does feel a war. We’ve seen the repeat pictures of this whole exodus of people from the south, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes, going to where?
They’re just going, a lot of them are setting up tents on the streets and sleeping on the streets. Also, the difference is we don’t have a state and Lebanon is strong states that can afford, you know, give them alternatives. They’ve opened some schools to them. And this means that they had to delay it’s a whole humanitarian disaster and not just for the people of the south of Lebanon.
It has a ripple effect that goes through all of Lebanon. the Shia population in the south of Lebanon is now going to Sunni areas and Christian areas. And this is already creating tensions between the people because, you know, in 2006, where a lot of Lebanese
Maybe there’s one more parallel because I feel that Israel is, as they did in Gaza, is only pursuing a military solution. without really having a political strategy behind it. So this is one big parallel that this government of Prime Minister Netanyahu is really aiming at finishing with their enemies on a military, with military means, which is not paying off, because organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah are not to be finished off only militarily.
There needs to be a political strategy to deal with them. the difference between these two organisations in a moment. at Hezbollah, a state within a state including social welfare and a health system or is it just a terror organization with powerful friends in Tehran? Hezbollah fits both descriptions. The day after the Hamas terror attacks on the 7th of October, Hezbollah started firing rockets on Israel. But what is Hezbollah really?
The so-called Party of God was founded in Lebanon in 1982 by a group of Shiite clerks to fight against Israel’s invasion.Hezbollah also has seats in the Lebanese parliament and functions as a de facto government in parts of the country, running schools and hospitals. Hezbollah’s stated goals remain the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of Western powers from Lebanon. Hezbollah receives hundreds of millions of dollars yearly from Iran, which also supports the organization with training and weapons. Many experts say that Hezbollah is one of the most heavily armed militant groups in the world.
According to Israeli estimates, the group has around 150,000 rockets and it could have as many as 100,000 fighters. That, at least, is what Hezbollah leader Hassan Asrallah claims. Experts have estimated the number is lower. How much has Hezbollah been weakened?
that still doesn’t indicate that Hezbollah is at its full capacity because these rocket launches, that’s something they have been for years, that’s something you only need to push a button for. the Pager attacks and the Walkie Talkie attacks of last week, how much have they actually frailed the command structures within Hezbollah? This is what remains to be seen. I think they could have frailed these command structures considerably.
Think about 3,000 attacks. that were conducted through pager and walkie talkie explosions, think of an organization, were probably about 20,000 people are actually fighting. So 3,000 to 20,000, that’s a considerable damage. There was some dispute about whether they were, strictly speaking, legal.
Israel rightfully claims that it was very targeted and in comparison to any major rocket fire or attacks like they did in Gaza, they didn’t hit too many civilians, and it was a targeted attack against Hezbollah fighters and Hezbollah members. At the same time, these were not weapons, these were communication devices that could be anywhere. It could be in a supermarket, in hospitals, at home, at the living room of these people.
Children would be playing with it. So the point is that the idea of these attacks was at the same time attacking and targeting Hezbollah, at the same time as well, creating a state of terror. people in Lebanon now, they feel really terrorized by whatever could explode next. this feeling is now being felt by a lot of people and by the civilian population at the same time. And we have to, I was a little bit shocked by the discourse, especially in Germany, because people would really celebrate these attacks as, you know, so smart and surgical, and saying that, you know, whoever carries a pager is a legitimate target. And I would argue that, you know, a nurse or a teacher in one of Hispola’s schools or hospitals would not be a legitimate target.
It was well calculated there would be civilian casualties, so this is why it’s disputed internationally, What are you hearing? A. How weakened is Hasbulla now by these attacks? And is this feeling of terror really permeating society in Libya? they tried a couple of days ago to shoot one of them to Tel Aviv, and you But they still do have a lot of weaponries that they can use. the major issue now of Hezbollah is a trust issue, a trust within the Hezbollah. itself, the organization itself, because it’s obviously been infiltrated on a very high level.
The Israelis have a massive amount of information on Hezbollah. I mean, after the Pages attack and the Wakatoke attacks, they targeted Ar-Radwan’s elite, this elite unit of Hezbollah, and they killed one of their, you know, very important leaders. they did attack them, they did have those information, and they did attack them in a building that was full of kids and full of other civilians. But this also shows that Israel is willing to go that far, does not care about the civilian casualties and is really going after Hezbollah.
Hezbollah also has a trust within its own members, but also needs to regain that trust with its own people because if their people still trust them anymore. Hezbollah’s always told their people. When you talk about their people, They’re supporters. The Shia population in Dahye in the south of Beirut and also in the south of Lebanon.
After the 2006 war, he told them, if I knew that this was going to cause all this destruction, I wouldn’t have taken, kidnapped those two Israeli soldiers. And since then, the people thought that they’re going to go to the south, rebuild their houses and be safe. But we discovered that this is not what’s happening. And he can’t even also, I mean, we heard in the report that Hezbollah has built hospitals, but those hospitals weren’t even enough to look after those wounded from the Pages attack.
they were bringing the people who were injured to other hospitals, so the American University Hospital in Beirut and to other hospitals in Christian areas and so on. Hezbollah needs to, what it needs to do, but it does definitely has a trust issue. amongst its supporter and definitely amongst itself in the organisation.
he bombing of Da’yeh, the very quarter of Beirut, which is Hezbollah’s stronghold. When people close to Hezbollah in the past few months, asking them what would be the red line for Hezbollah, they all that will be a moment where Hezbollah will be forced by the sheer outrage of its own members to respond in full force. And that’s not what we’re seeing at the moment.
Hezbollah is not using its full force in response to Israel. That was said also when Fahd Shekhar was assassinated, the first high-ranking leaders that the Israelis assassinated. And also Hezbollah didn’t respond. here you can argue that Iran, its main sponsor and creator, doesn’t want it to respond in a way that will bring the whole region into a war.
But this is making Hezbollah definitely lose trust amongst its own supporters. And we’re seeing the red line moving upwards again and again and again. And that entails the risk of things spiraling out of control at some point. But at the same time, all these leaders can be replaced.
all the fighters can be replaced. The question is, how effective will this strategy be to only go militarily against Hezbollah? Hezbollah really tries to connect the whole fight now to Gaza, to the war in Gaza that it says has to end for them to stop sending rockets. While at the same time, what the Israeli government’s trying to do is to disconnect the two subjects.
What they’re really trying to do is to put so much pressure on Hezbollah for them to agree finally to withdraw to north of Litani River, 30 kilometers away from the border. by only giving them, you know, the stop, stopping the assault and stopping the firing. Bringing Hisbollah in this position to no longer act for or demand the ceasefire for Gaza. Which is, this is really the calculation because what Netanyahu wants is really, he wants to finish off, he wants to stop this threat from the north, no matter what’s going on in Gaza. He wants to separate the two issues.
this is exactly what Hisbollah has been trying to avoid. They want to connect it because it’s their fight. I mean, they’re saying it’s kind of their fight. They try to make is Israel controlling the timing at least with these pager attacks? And Hezbollah now is on the back foot and has to react. So is this A, a rehabilitation of the security forces of Israel, and B, is this a successful, from the Israeli point of view, a successful strategy? Well, that’s a very interesting point, differ with Ghurida.
which might be based on Israeli intelligence sources, which came out right after the Pager attacks, which basically said, these Pager attacks and walkie talkie attacks were actually devised and planned for the case of an all-out war, to be the first step in an all-out war in order to be able to do what was to destroy the communications and command structures of Hezbollah.
forced to do it because these preparations were close to be discovered by Hezbollah. And that’s why we had to do it now. And I think that’s more or less credible because, A, it is an excellent preparation for an imminent war, but we’re not seeing, B, Israel leading this war in full force now.
This is not full force, 500 civilians dying in one day and bombing, killing civilians, regardless of, you know, there are kids in the place where they’re bombed. As terrible as all of that is, most unfortunately I have to say it is not the worst thing that could happen. It is against the international law as well. It is, but we could also see carpet bombings in Da’yeh. We could see the Israeli defence forces south. They did do that in 2006. Absolutely.
PEDRA attacks were a preparation for the worst case scenarios. So yes, Israel is trying to instrumentalize that as a victory for its own security apparatus, whose ability has been called into question lately. But I’m not sure as how calculated that step of escalation is.
the biggest problem on the Israeli side here is that they’re moving closer to an extremely dangerous and brutal war without actually having a plan on where to go in the medium run. And an exit strategy.
Lebanon there is a clear goal that can hardly be achieved with with political means there is beyond the imminent question of Israeli citizens moving back into the north of the country and in order to facilitate that and make that possible to move Hezbollah away from the border, the more essential security interest of Israel vis-a-vis Hezbollah is destroying its missile capability of more than 150,000 missiles.
This is never going to happen. And that’s a core security dilemma of the region. a look at Israel for a moment, because for Israel, the recent escalation does create a dangerous second front in its fight against its many sworn enemies. But Israel seems oblivious to the risks, even seems to be seeking the confrontation at all costs.
Explosives planted in Hezbollah members’ pages and walkie-talkies, presumably by Israeli intelligence, by extensive airstrikes. It seems that Israel has entered a new phase in its conflict with Hezbollah. Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared that the goal of the war is the safe return of Israeli residents. Sixty thousand Israelis have had to leave their homes. Israel wants to force Hezbollah to withdraw from the border areas to the north side of the Litani River.
We eliminate senior officials, we eliminate terrorists, we eliminate missiles, and there’s more to come. But it’s still unclear whether this strategy will work. For the people in the country’s north, the intensification of the conflict is having far-reaching consequences. Streets are empty and hospitals have been evacuated. And yet it is uncertain if Hezbollah will give in despite the heavy blows dealt to its leadership. Could Lebanon also be facing the threat of a ground offensive? Yeah, let’s pick up right there.
Can this whole operation be successful without a ground offensive? Well, the ground offensive is something that Netanyahu in the past always wanted to avoid, basically, looking back at the history of the occupation, Israeli occupation, South Lebanon, and how their withdrawal in 2000 was leading to a major victory for Hezbollah.
That was basically the basic They were celebrated as heroes all over the region. they feel they really have to go in to destroy all these military facilities in the south. Hezbollah is waiting for just that. For them, it would be the fight that they have been preparing for and waiting for a long time.
So from that calculation, this would be a wrong step. The whole question is whether you can really force Hezbollah to not attack. They consider themselves to be defending Lebanon, to be a resistance movement. They are part of the Axis of Resistance. So in the end, everything will be settled on through… diplomatic means. I mean, in the end, they will sit down and it will be the quick question is how to implement the resolution 1701 that forces Sizbollah to withdraw who could take over in the south of Lebanon. This is not possible because of a weak Lebanese government.
That’s true. But in the end, the question is what military means you can never reign in these organizations. So the bigger picture here is that Israel has an alternative. I would argue it had it could have partners in the region. to control and to confront Iran, which is at the very back of all these threats from an Israeli point of view. But this government Netanyahu is not calculating.
He has to do what his radical partners, his radical ministers, messianic ministers ask him to do, which is occupying Gaza, which is annexation of So what he needs to do is to form a coalition with the West, with the region, with countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, which is something that was on the table now for months. from the Biden administration. This is where everybody has been working on, whereas this Israeli government is refusing to walk down that diplomatic road.
the Lebanese government. we’re only talking about Hezbollah. We’re never talking about Lebanon as a country and its government. What can the Lebanese government do, or is it too intertwined with Hezbollah? The Lebanese government at the moment is a caretaker government, it’s not even government. We don’t have a president. I mean, this is the major issue in Lebanon.
summary: The weaker the state becomes, the stronger Hezbollah becomes. So unlike in 2006, when the war with Israel lasted one month and ended up with the Resolution 1701, we had a strong government then. For Adesan Yura, it was very vocal. And you know the international community trusted us and we have the support of the Arab countries as well The Gulf countries checked a lot of money in Lebanon for reconstruction efforts The Saudis put money in the central bank to stabilize the economy But since then a lot of this changed now Lebanon is isolated On an Arabic level because of Hezbollah’s interference in the region since then I mean its interference It’s meddling in Yemen supporting the Houthis the its interference mainly in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad and killing all those Syrians who are opposed to Bashar al-Assad. And this has caused, you know, a lot of the Arab people to not support Hezbollah at the moment. And the fact that the Lebanese government now is a caretaker government and is weak by definition, of course, it makes everything worse there is no one in charge in Lebanon, and Hezbollah holds and has been holding, the decisions of peace and war in his hand.
against the will of most of the Lebanese at the moment. But, you know, and we don’t see an alternative. Like we have been telling Hezbollah, a lot of Lebanese have been telling Hezbollah, we do not want to be involved in this since the 8th of October when Hezbollah decided to start firing rockets at Israel, despite the will of everyone else in the country. You know, and now we’re at this point and the government is paralyzed really.
This US-sponsored initiative that both France, the UK, and also Germany are supporting. And we’re actually seeing rather encouraging reactions to that from Israel. At least, Danny Danon, Israel’s UN ambassador, has said that Israel is looking for a diplomatic solution. We might not take these statements at face value.
the reason for that is, first of all, that Israel knows about the cost. off going into all out war with a ground offensive. And secondly, I think that like most parties in the Middle East, Israel would like to know who is going to rule in the White House for the next four years before making major decisions and major steps. Right, we have one minute left.
Israel would have an alternative that with this government is not very viable. So I’m afraid that the whole Gaza point will only come to an end when we see the results of the American elections. It needs to stop where it started in Gaza. Netanyahu has to accept that he has to end the war in Gaza and allow the Palestinians to have their own state finally. Nasrallah did say that if this war stops, we will stop.
