Back in May, Amos Hochstein, US President Joe Biden\u2019s point-man for keeping a lid on tensions between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, spoke in a webinar. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I worry about every single day,\u201d he said, \u201cis that a miscalculation or an accident\u2026 hits a bus full of children, or hits another kind of civilian target, that could force the political system in either country to retaliate in a way that slides us into war. Even though both sides probably understand that a fuller or deeper-scale war is in neither side\u2019s interest.\u201d <\/p>\n
The equivalent of that bus came on Saturday evening in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. <\/p>\n
A rocket, which Israel says was launched by Hezbollah from Chebaa in southern Lebanon, slammed into a soccer pitch in the Druze town of Majdal Shams. <\/strong>Twelve children, ranging in age from 10 to 16, were killed while taking part in a training session. Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the strike. Will Hochstein\u2019s fear of a fuller-scale war now also come to pass? <\/p>\n If Israel\u2019s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, is to be believed, it probably will. \u201cWe are approaching the moment of an all-out war against Hezbollah,\u201d he said in an Israeli television interview on Saturday evening. \u201cThe response to this event will be accordingly.\u201d <\/p>\n The United States has apparently blessed retaliatory action, to some degree. \u201cWe stand by Israel\u2019s right to defend its citizens from terrorist attacks,\u201d said Secretary of State Antony Blinken, before adding that the US did not want to \u201csee the conflict escalate.\u201d <\/p>\n For months now, the international community has been trying to de-escalate tensions between Israel and Hezbollah. With Iran\u2019s strongest proxy estimated to have at least 150,000 missiles and rockets pointing south, the fear is of a war that would devastate Lebanon, and do serious damage to Israel. <\/p>\n And yet, over the past near-10 months of fighting, Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have always pulled back from what appeared to be the brink. In January, Israel took out a senior Hamas leader in Beirut. All-out war failed to materialise. In April, Israel killed a top commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRCHG) in Damascus. In response, Iran launched unprecedented strikes on Israel. All-out war failed to materialise. <\/p>\n The status quo, of course, can\u2019t continue either. Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from their homes. Large swathes of northern Israel are like ghost towns. A similar picture plays out in southern Lebanon. The best way to avoid all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, says Blinken, is to get a ceasefire in Gaza. Talks aimed at achieving that resume on Sunday. <\/p>\n But that would only be a short-term fix. Israel wants to remove the Hezbollah threat entirely, moving it back to the Litani River, in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution that ended the last major war between the two in 2006. \u201cIf the world doesn\u2019t get Hezbollah away from the border, Israel will do it,\u201d said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in December. <\/p>\n And so despite the bombast, domestic pressures, the fears and the escalations, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continues to simmer rather than boil over. No one seems to want this war. But as Hochstein warned in that same webinar: \u201cWars have started historically around the world even when leaders didn\u2019t want them, because they had no choice.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in May, Amos Hochstein, US President Joe Biden\u2019s point-man for keeping a lid on tensions between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, spoke in a webinar. \u201cWhat I worry about every single day,\u201d he said, \u201cis that a miscalculation or an accident\u2026 hits a bus full of children, or hits another kind of civilian target, that could force the political system in either <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5614,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}