by Michael
Months of negotiations have proved fruitless, and it appears that we really are about to get a “full-fledged war” in the Middle East. Sadly, I don’t think that any of the parties involved have really thought this through. Both sides have been arming themselves to the teeth since the last war ended in 2006, and both sides are willing to literally do whatever it takes to win. Of course Israel will not just be fighting Hezbollah this time around. The IDF will be facing an entire alliance of enemies, and in order to win such a conflict the Israelis will be forced to do things that they would rather not do.
On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah just continued to pummel one another…
Israel announced dozens of new air strikes on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon Tuesday, a day after Lebanese officials say 558 people, including 50 children, were killed in the deadliest bombardment since a devastating war in 2006. Israel’s latest strikes on southern Lebanon came after it said it had killed a “large number” of militants as it struck about 1,500 suspected Hezbollah targets around the country.
Hezbollah said Tuesday it had launched volleys of missiles at Israeli military bases, hours after 180 of its projectiles and an unmanned aerial vehicle crossed into Israeli airspace, sending people in the city of Haifa running for shelter. The Israeli military said more than 50 projectiles were fired into northern Israel in less than 10 minutes on Tuesday morning, most of which were intercepted.
In addition to projectiles, Hezbollah also sent drones deep into Israeli territory.
In fact, it is being reported that drones actually targeted a naval base which is located quite a bit south of Haifa…
Sky News and others are reporting that for the first time of the conflict, Hezbollah has launched a drone attack on a navy base which lies south of Haifa. The Atlit navy base which was targeted lies 80 kilometers from the Lebanese border. This is an attack significantly deep into Israel and reveals an extended range of Hezbollah missiles. Likely as things slide further, and with Israel keeping up its intense airstrikes on Lebanon, Hezbollah missiles will begin reaching further and further.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said late in the day Tuesday (local time) on X: “We will continue striking Hezbollah. Anyone who has a missile in their living room and a rocket in their garage will not have a home.”
Hezbollah just keeps escalating matters, and this is a huge mistake, because it is just going to make Israel even more determined to take action.
IDF forces are being deployed to northern Israel, and a spokesperson for the IDF has told the press that the army is at a state of “full-scale readiness”…
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesperson for the IDF, insisted military chiefs were “not looking for wars” but would do “whatever is necessary” to ensure Israel’s security.
He later clarified the army was at “full-scale readiness”, meaning an invasion could be on the cards.
My personal opinion is that Israel will not launch an operation in southern Lebanon this month.
But Israeli President Isaac Herzog is warning that “we will do whatever it takes to bring our citizens back home and enable calm in our cities”…
“Israel is not interested, did not want this war, and is not interested in going to war with Lebanon,” Herzog told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Tuesday.
“But Israel has been attacked from Oct. 8 from Lebanon endlessly. And if you look at the situation today, Hezbollah has launched missiles and rockets all over the northern part of Israel. So we will do whatever it takes to bring our citizens back home and enable calm in our cities. That’s the situation.”
“We’ve shown our capabilities, and we have much more on the way, if they will continue,” Herzog added.
For now, I expect that Israel will continue to strike Hezbollah targets all over southern Lebanon, and thousands upon thousands of local residents are fleeing north in order to escape the violence…
Cars choked Lebanon’s highways as people fled into the night, trying to escape north toward the capital Beirut.
“It was a day of terror,” 41-year-old housewife Thuraya Harb told AFP at a makeshift center for displaced families in Beirut after fleeing her home in south Lebanon.
“I didn’t want to leave my home, but the children were scared,” the mother of four said, adding that the family fled “with nothing but the clothes on our backs.”
So many families and so many children on both sides are being affected by this conflict.
That should deeply sadden all of us.
But this is just the beginning.
So much death and destruction is ahead, and a top EU diplomat is admitting that we really are “almost in a full-fledged war”…
“I can say that we are almost in a full-fledged war,” European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters earlier. “If this is not a war situation, I don’t know what you would call it.”
As I discussed earlier, when an all-out war erupts it won’t just be Israel fighting Hezbollah.
Every day, there are more reports of Iranian-backed militia groups sending troops to Lebanon. Here is just one example…
Most of the leaders of the Iranian-backed militias have left the city of Mayadeen, east of Deir Ezzor, over the past two days, for the Qusayr area in the Homs countryside and from there to Lebanon, according to a local reporter of the DeirEzzor24 Network .
Our reporter said that among those leaving were the so-called “Hajj Najaf”, the official in charge of the Iranian “Al-Shifa” hospital in the city of Mayadeen, and “Hajj Malik”, the military commander in the Revolutionary Guard militia, with some leaders remaining in the city to complete some administrative matters, with the possibility of joining them.
The departure of the militia leaders from Deir Ezzor for Lebanon comes amid an Israeli military escalation against the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.
Many of these troops are quite eager to participate in a “final showdown” with Israel.
Of course there are a lot of experts that believe Iran could be pulled directly into the conflict as well, and Iranian leaders are issuing some very ominous statements…
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said today that its ally Hezbollah ‘cannot stand alone’ against Israel, which he said was ‘being defended and supported and supplied by Western countries, by European countries and the United States’.
He said Iran had ‘never started a war in the last 100 years’ and was ‘not looking to cause insecurity’.
But he insisted that Iran ‘will never allow a country to force us into something and threaten our security and territorial integrity’, while his foreign minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that ‘Iran will NOT remain indifferent’ to the conflict.
Iran and Hezbollah both possess vast arsenals of highly sophisticated missiles.
And the combined ground forces of Iran, Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups throughout the region would greatly outnumber the ground forces that the IDF is able to muster.
So as the Daily Mail has pointed out, we could eventually be facing a scenario where the U.S. military has to get directly involved and Israel feels forced to use weapons that it does not want to use…
The Islamic Republic has thousands upon thousands of long-range and precision-guided missiles alongside hundreds of thousands of mid-range cruise missiles.
This appears to be the worst-case scenario feared by Israeli defence experts – a coordinated attack in which Iran, Hezbollah and other members of the so-called Axis of Resistance launch wave after wave of missile and drone strikes that overwhelm Israel’s air defences and devastate towns and cities.
Several analysts told MailOnline that terrifying prospect is unlikely because it would prompt the US to come to Israel’s defence – and could even raise the spectre of Israel turning to its secretive stockpile of nuclear weapons.
We really are on the verge of the unthinkable.
But nobody will be able to say that we weren’t warned.
It has taken decades for us to reach this point, and even though we are on the brink of an apocalyptic war nobody seems to want to back down.
This is not going to end well, and vast numbers of people are going to die.