Hezbollah published drone video footage of sensitive Israeli positions
including chemical and oil storage facilities around the port of Haifa,
June 18, 2024 [photo credit: Al Manar]
In a bid to halt what seems a spiral into all out war along the Lebanese border the senior US envoy Amos Hochstein
met with Benjamin Netanyahu and his estranged defence minister Yoav
Gallant on Monday before heading to Beirut to meet with Nabih Berri, the
speaker of Lebanon’s dysfunctional parliament and a close ally of
Hezbollah.
As the military skirmishes and the diplomatic shuffles continue the
more than 170,000 Lebanese and Israelis who have been displaced on
either side of the border wait and wonder when or if they will ever get
back to their homes.
After undertaking a road trip to the Israeli north Haaretz’s Yaniv Kubovich was prompted to write:
Road 899, commonly known as the northern road, is silent, and one
can drive a while on it without seeing a single vehicle. The country
seems to have abandoned the region itself, and not just the residents who left immediately after October 7 in fear of their lives.
A journey by another journalist Agnes Helou writing for Breaking Defense
presented a similar picture this time from Lebanon. Helou described a
landscape of “villages …ground to almost nothing, only debris and ruins
left,” and added:
Lebanon now feels as if the 4,000 square mile-sized country is
shattered into two realities: one north of the Nabatieh district, more
or less carrying on as normal, and the rest as another country in the
grips of war.
A trip from Beirut to towns in Marjeyoun on a Sunday,
which used to be the highest traffic day of the week, took only an hour
and fifteen minutes, almost half the time it normally would.
Of course the thing about normal in Lebanon is that with a paralysed
parliament and a wrecked economy normal always gets worse. And should
the Israelis carry out their threat of “devastating consequences” the
worst is easily imaginable and terrible to comprehend.
What happens next in Gaza and on the border as ever comes back to Benjamin Netanyahu. Haaretz’s Amos Harel puts it well:
One reason the goals of the fighting in the north haven't changed
is that Netanyahu doesn't want to set forth ambitious, clear targets,
which will make it possible to examine his performance in accordance
with their attainment. The heart of the matter – and this is true of
both arenas – lies in the prime minister's difficulty in making
decisions whose political ramifications will be able to influence his
surviving in power. In practice, there is no real Israeli policy; It's
more a rolling campaign, on both fronts.
A rolling campaign with no end in sight orchestrated by a man who
wants to stay out of jail. No wonder the anxiety meter is heading to
ten.
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