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If not for the ongoing carnage in Gaza, there’s a good chance the spiral of violence between Israel and the Lebanon-based military group Hezbollah would be the Middle Eastern conflict dominating the world’s attention right now. In the weeks leading up to the current Israeli offensive in Rafah, there was often more actual fighting happening on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon than in the south in Gaza.
The fighting has been happening since the day after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, when Hezbollah launched guided rocket strikes against Israel in what it called “solidarity with the victorious Palestinian resistance.” Hezbollah has continually fired rockets and drones into Israel and in return, the Israeli military has launched air and military strikes against the group’s bases in Lebanon in response. Hamas and Hezbollah are both Iran-backed, anti-Israel militant groups, though they differ significantly in ideology and operational approach.
In the first six months of the fighting, there were at least 4,400 combined strikes from both sides, according to the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). An estimated 250 Hezbollah members and 75 Lebanese civilians have been killed in the fighting, along with 20 Israelis — both civilians and soldiers. More than 60,000 residents of northern Israel have been displaced by the attacks, along with some 90,000 people in southern Lebanon.
Those numbers may pale against the far larger death toll and refugee crisis caused by the fighting in Gaza, but the situation in the north could have been — and may yet be — far worse than it has been, given the military strength on both sides. The Israeli military is, for its size, one of the most powerful in the world, while Hezbollah is the best-armed non-state group in the world, with an arsenal of between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles and up to 30,000 active personnel and 20,000 reserves, according to CSIS estimates. If it wanted to, Hezbollah could cause far more damage on Israel than Hamas — which, for comparison, had around 30,000 rockets before October 7 — ever could.
While both sides have seemed to be trying to avoid escalating the fighting into a full-scale war as devastating as the one they fought in 2006, that doesn’t mean such a war won’t happen anyway. After the latest series of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) airstrikes in Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah drone attacks on May 6 that killed two IDF soldiers, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant predicted a “hot summer” on the border.
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