United States President Joe Biden’s Senior Adviser for Energy and Investment, Amos Hochstein cautioned Lebanese officials about a potential limited Israeli attack on the country’s Hezbollah, Israeli broadcaster Kan reported on Thursday. Hochstein emphasized that if Hezbollah continues its near-daily assaults on northern Israel, the paramilitary organization could face an American-backed attack by the Israeli forces. He further emphasized the importance of finding a diplomatic solution to address the ongoing attacks by Hezbollah on northern Israel and to push back the Iran-backed group from the common border. Following his visit to Israel, Hochstein is currently in Lebanon to avoid a full-scale war across the common border amidst the recent escalation of hostilities. A drastic escalation of tensions between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon over the past week has brought the prospect of an expansion of war across the Middle East ever closer. Following Israel’s assassination of a senior Hezbollah commander and a retaliatory rocket barrage fired on northern Israel, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) released a statement Tuesday declaring that operational plans for a war in Lebanon have been approved. Since the beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, Israel has exchanged almost daily fire with Hezbollah across the border. To date, Israeli air strikes and shelling have killed over 340 Hezbollah members and dozens of civilians in southen Lebanon, while Hezbollah rockets have killed 10 Israeli civilians and 15 IDF soldiers. But the exchanges intensified markedly last week after Israel assassinated Taleb Abdullah, the most senior Hezbollah commander to be killed since October. Hezbollah responded by striking the Mount Meron air traffic control base in northern Israel on Saturday, prompting the IDF to insist that “no harm to the unit’s capabilities” was caused by the attack. On Tuesday, Hezbollah released drone footage of military sites and civilian infrastructure in Haifa in what was seen as an exposure of the limits of Israel’s much-vaunted air defences in the north. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz responded in a statement:
We are getting very close to the moment of deciding on changing the rules of the game against Hezbollah and Lebanon. In an all-out war, Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be severely beaten.
Later in the day, the IDF issued a statement indicating that an offensive into Lebanon is looming. It declared:
As part of the assessment of the situation, operational plans for the attack in Lebanon were approved and implemented and decisions were made to continue accelerating the readiness of the forces in the field.
The Biden administration dispatched its special envoy for the Middle East, Amos Hochstein, to the region, where he held talks Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and President Isaac Herzog, before travelling on to Lebanon on Tuesday. Herzog reportedly discussed with Hochstein “the urgent need to restore security to the northern border,” a euphemism for destroying Hezbollah. While media reports presented Hochstein’s trip as an attempt to “deescalate” the conflict. Washington appears to be temporarily applying the brakes on its Israeli ally above all because it would prefer to have more time to cobble together an anti-Iranian alliance that includes the Arab Gulf states for war against Tehran.