Haaretz: War with Hezbollah To Overshadow Everything before, ‘Israel’ Exhausted & Struck in Many Arenas

“As the Gaza war enters its ninth month, it's hard to report that there are good news on the horizon. A series of discussions held in the past few weeks with ranking figures in the military establishment increasingly indicate that ‘Israel’ is headed for a magnificent multidimensional failure.”

He further mentioned: “Strategically, we are stuck in all arenas. The biggest and most important of them [against Hezbollah in Lebanon] is in danger of morphing into a conflagration which, if it happens, will overshadow everything that happened before it.”

Harel also detailed: “Like in the old American movies, ‘Israel’ and Hezbollah are playing chicken on the edge of a cliff. Perhaps that the old cliché that neither side wants an all-out war is still true. But they are liable to get to that stage, largely as a result of miscalculation. Like in Gaza, ‘Israel’ is not succeeding in translating a high accumulation of tactical achievements into a strategic victory. At the beginning of the war, Hezbollah Secretary-General [Sayyed] Hassan Nasrallah decided to wage a participatory effort in the north, thereby pinning down large numbers of ‘Israeli’ soldiers and helping Hamas in Gaza without being pulled into an all-out confrontation. Following the collapse of the first cease-fire agreement at the beginning of last December, he declared that he was resuming hostilities and would hold his fire only when the war in Gaza ends.”

“What Hezbollah is fomenting – the evacuation of 60,000 ‘Israelis’… along the border, a continuing trickle of fatalities in the north, the launching of dozens of rockets and drones every day – is sufficient to heighten the public's frustration and step up the pressure on the government to act,” he added.

The military analyst also underlined that “Some Likud and far-right cabinet ministers want to go even further and launch an all-out offensive against Hezbollah. This week marks the 42nd anniversary of the [failed] 1982 war in Lebanon, and it looks like these people haven't learned a thing from that ‘Israeli’ attempt to impose order in Lebanon.”

He went on to say: “Above all, and despite the increasingly unsubtle hints being dropped by talking heads on television, the public apparently hasn't yet grasped the difference in terms of the damage that Hezbollah's rockets can cause as compared to Hamas'. The number of rockets Hamas fired on the first day – 5,000 – can be replicated by Hezbollah every day for a month; and many of those rockets are heavier, have a longer range and are also more accurate.”

In parallel, Harel underscored that “in any event, the cities of the north and the center will encounter a threat of a scale and intensity never seen in the past. We need to hope that Hezbollah also understands the enormity of the danger and grasps how much damage will be inflicted on Lebanon's infrastructure and on the Lebanese people, and that this will restrain its behavior.”