An unusual crush of summer shocks — President Biden’s debate debacle, electoral upheavals in Britain and France — seemed for a spell to push other crises into the background. The Israeli-Gaza war, in any case, seemed at last report to be approaching a cease-fire.
That may still be so. A new cease-fire proposal from Hamas, the militant organization that Israel is fighting to destroy in Gaza, set off a round of urgent contacts among all the parties in the fray — Israel, the United States, Egypt, Qatar — and a meeting of the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah.
That meeting may be of particular interest in what could be the endgame in the brutal nine-month-old war. While America’s and the world’s attention have been largely fixed on the devastation of Gaza, Israel has been turning an increasingly wary eye on its north, specifically the threat posed from Lebanon by Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite Islamist paramilitary-political organization backed, like Hamas, by Iran. Since the Gaza war erupted on Oct. 7 with the murderous Hamas raid in southern Israel, Hezbollah has been sporadically lobbing shells across the northern border and has vowed to continue doing so for the duration of the Gaza war.
Despite efforts by both Israel and Hezbollah to avoid an open war, that possibility is becoming a matter of growing concern. This week, for example, an Israeli attack killed a senior Hezbollah commander, and Hezbollah retaliated with a barrage of rockets and drones. That’s the kind of development that could easily escalate into an all-out conflict.
The threat of getting drawn into a war with Hezbollah, in fact, is one reason Israel’s top generals are pushing for a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza even if Hamas has not been eliminated. Hezbollah is a considerably more powerful foe than Hamas, with a huge arsenal of missiles, rockets and drones, including precision-guided missiles that could hit critical Israeli targets. A cease-fire in Gaza would lower the tensions in the north and give Israel time to replenish its munitions for the possibility of a bigger fray. Israel has also had to move 50,000 residents along the northern border who are eager to return home.
Hezbollah is also most likely keen to avoid a full fight. It has had to move 100,000 Lebanese residents back from frontline areas, and Lebanon is an economic mess.
After the latest flare-up on the northern border, the Biden administration contacted France, once the administrative power in Lebanon, to help try to cool tensions. Netanyahu, for his part, has resisted his generals’ call for a Gaza cease-fire until Hamas is eradicated.
And so, as Aluf Benn, the veteran journalist and editor in chief of Haaretz, wrote this week under the headline “The Other, Scarier Front,” people on both sides of the border wonder when and how the war will end or whether it will “explode into the most destructive war in either country’s history.”