Israel intensified its attacks to target Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, hitting a densely populated neighborhood in Beirut on Thursday after days of launching airstrikes on the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital.
At least 22 people were killed and 117 wounded, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry.
The White House said it was discussing the campaign with the Israelis and reiterated support for Israel’s right to defend itself.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told VOA during a briefing Thursday that Israel’s operations in Lebanon “are indeed targeted.”
Jean-Pierre contended that the administration’s goals of preventing Lebanon from turning into “another Gaza” and supporting Israel’s efforts to dismantle the infrastructure of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, are not contradictory.
“Both things could be true and at the same time,” she said, underscoring the need for a cease-fire deal.
The Israeli military said Thursday it killed two Hezbollah commanders in its most recent airstrikes. But like its campaign in Gaza, Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon has become the target of international criticism.
“Far too many people are paying an unimaginable price, with over 2,000 killed, many more wounded and hundreds of thousands displaced,” U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said Wednesday.
Many disagree that the yearlong Israeli strikes are surgical in nature and say the Biden administration has not done enough to prevent the Gaza war from spreading into another front in Lebanon.
“It’s all well and good for the Biden administration to say that they want to give Israel that space to attack Hezbollah and degrade its capability,” said Mohamad Bazzi, director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University.
“But the problem is that also means an open-ended war against Lebanon, an open-ended war that has been harming a tremendous number of Lebanese civilians, and that’s displaced now 1 million people in Lebanon,” he told VOA. “That’s a huge — that’s almost a quarter of the population.”
Pushing for elections
The Biden administration may be setting its sights on a longer-term goal: to capitalize on Israel’s success in taking out Hezbollah’s leadership and dismantling its infrastructure by pushing for the election of a new Lebanese president.
The country’s last president, Michel Aoun, who had close ties with Hezbollah, ended his term in 2022. The Lebanese parliament has not selected his replacement, adding to Lebanon’s political and economic instability.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Wednesday that ultimately what the U.S. wants is for Lebanon to be “able to break the grip that Hezbollah has had on the country.”
Washington wants to “remove Hezbollah’s veto over a president, which has kept the country in a political stalemate for two years and kept it from moving forward in electing a president,” Miller said, and “remove Hezbollah’s ability to block the state from being the sole entity that can exercise force in southern Lebanon.”
U.S. support for Israel’s campaign to root out Hezbollah in Lebanon is a departure from the 21-day cease-fire call Washington made with allies in late September.
According to the White House readout of President Joe Biden’s phone call Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the first direct conversation between the leaders since Israel’s campaign in Lebanon — Biden did not reiterate the cease-fire call to the Israeli prime minister.
Some analysts support efforts to restore credible leadership in Lebanon.
“Since November 2022, Hezbollah’s obstruction and the failures of the international community — particularly the Quintet of the U.S., France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt — have left Lebanon without a president for nearly two years,” said Fadi Nicholas Nassar, the U.S.-Lebanon Fellow at the Middle East Institute.
The “essential elements for transformative change in Lebanon” are in place, Nassar told VOA. “What is needed now is the political will in Washington to seize this moment and leverage these resources to ensure lasting security.”
Without a cease-fire, however, it’s hard to imagine how the country can conduct elections, Bazzi said. Right now, “there isn’t the sequencing of concrete steps, and also using of U.S. leverage to reach those steps,” he added.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Kassem said the militant group supported the efforts of Lebanese Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally, to secure a cease-fire in Lebanon, delinking it from their previous requirement for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Miller dismissed his comment as Hezbollah changing its tune because the group is “on the back foot and is getting battered” by Israeli strikes.
Israeli weighs response to Iran
As Israel continued strikes in Lebanon, its security Cabinet met Thursday night to discuss its response to the barrage of about 180 Iranian ballistic missiles last week.
Biden has urged Israel not to attack Iran’s oil sites amid Gulf states’ concerns that their own oil facilities could come under fire from Tehran’s proxies.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, vowed earlier this week that his nation’s response would be lethal and surprising.
Natasha Hall, a Middle East senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Israel has shown “it has a lot of cards, and it could play any number, any of them.”
“It’s also shown that it will go against U.S. wishes,” she told VOA. “So, I really think everything is on the table at this point.”
Wounded peacekeepers
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon said on Thursday that Israeli forces had deliberately fired on its positions, injuring two Indonesian peacekeepers and bringing fresh accusations of violations of international law.
“The IDF’s indiscriminate attacks against UNIFIL [U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon], which wounded two of our peacekeepers, clearly demonstrates how Israel positioned itself above international law, above impunity and above our shared values of peace,” Hari Prabowo, deputy permanent representative of Indonesia to the United Nations, said Thursday.
Syrian state media also reported civilians killed by Israeli airstrikes in the capital, Damascus, on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Palestinian suffering continues in Gaza, where an Israeli strike Thursday on a school-turned-shelter killed at least 27 people.
