Analysts: Lebanon prepares for deadlier conflict with Israel

Analysts say Lebanon is bracing for a deadlier conflict as Israel launches its deepest airstrikes across the country in years.

They said Monday’s Israeli air strike on Baalbek in Lebanon’s deep Bekaa Valley was the most serious since the killing of senior Hamas official Saleh Al-Arouri in the capital Beirut in early January.

The Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it shot down an Israeli drone over Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold where air defense forces are stationed. It then launched a missile that was intercepted by Israel and landed near a synagogue near Nazareth in northern Israel, causing no casualties or property damage.

Subsequently, an Israeli fighter jet carried out a targeted killing of Hassan Salami, a senior Hezbollah official in southern Lebanon, claiming that he was responsible for rocket attacks in northern Israel.

“Neither side wants to show that they are backing down because they will lose credibility,” analyst Dania Koleilat Khatib told VOA.

Khatib, chairman of the Center for Cooperation and Peacebuilding Research in Beirut, said: “There are more and more tit-for-tat situations. If Hezbollah does not show their ‘resistance’, they are finished politically. If they resist, they may be like suffered losses like 2006 [with Israel], but they will regain their legality in a few years. They have rebuilt their capabilities and now reportedly have 150,000 precision-guided missiles. “

War “is looming between Lebanon and Israel,” said Lebanon analyst Patricia Karam, a nonresident fellow at the Washington-based Arab Center.

“On the one hand, Lebanon is at the mercy of Hezbollah, whose raison d’etre is its resistance to the Israeli occupation of parts of Lebanon,” she said. “On the other hand, it also risks falling prey to the Israelis’ belief that a true defeat of Hezbollah will restore their sense of security.”

She said Israel had been “intensifying its rhetoric against Hezbollah and demanding that it withdraw from its borders.”

David Hale, a global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, said during a recent webinar at the center that the Lebanese army cannot be deployed on the border with Israel, even though Hezbollah appears to “have a lot of autonomy, the answer to the border problem” In Tehran, not Beirut.”

Analyst Khatib agrees. “Everything to do with Lebanese foreign policy, whether it’s with Syria or Israel, is a decision made by Iran,” she said.