(Washington Post) John Hudson - The Biden administration is divided over Israel's military escalation against Hizbullah, with some senior officials seeing it as a potentially effective means of degrading the Lebanese militant group and forcing it to back down. "Full-scale war is not in anyone's interest," President Joe Biden told the UN on Tuesday. On Oct. 8, a day after Hamas's surprise attack on Israel, Hizbullah opened a second front, shelling Israel from the north. Hizbullah has said it would end its rocket attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza, but Israel refuses to link the conflict with Hizbullah to hostilities in Gaza. Israeli leaders want to push Hizbullah back from its positions in southern Lebanon far enough to create a buffer zone that would allow displaced Israelis to return to their abandoned homes in the country's north. Some administration officials are "cautiously supportive of the strategy...[of] putting pressure on Hizbullah," said Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hizbullah at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. counterterrorism official. "They are vigorously pursuing a diplomatic effort, but the leverage for it has been the Israeli escalation." A senior Israeli official said the increased military operations in Lebanon in recent days were intended to persuade Hizbullah to negotiate and were not intended to start a broader war. "The key element of this strategy is deterrence. We will not let Hizbullah drag us to a war of attrition. We do not seek war, but we will not and cannot be seen as deterred from it, because that will encourage Hizbullah to escalate." Israeli officials are unapologetic about their escalating effort to hit Hizbullah. Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said, "We are attacking our enemies in Lebanon, we are attacking Hamas in Gaza, and we are not in a position that we are waiting for the mercy of the world to support us."
2024-09-26 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive