CNN —
The US believes Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah with last week’s strikes but is concerned that escalating fighting could spark a wider conflict across the Middle East and is working hard behind the scenes to persuade Hezbollah not to escalate further and launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, officials told CNN.
“This is the closest we’ve come to a regional war” since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, one of the officials said.
Hezbollah launched drone and rocket attacks on Israel the next day, sparking months of hostilities across a border that has long been Israel’s quietest. The situation escalated last week when Israel launched covert attacks that detonated Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. Israel followed up with airstrikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon that have killed hundreds of civilians and Hezbollah leaders in recent days. Hezbollah responded with rocket attacks targeting Israeli facilities, including Ramat David Air Base east of Haifa.
The U.S. assesses that neither Israel nor Hezbollah have an interest in all-out war, officials said, but a senior State Department official expressed skepticism to reporters on Monday about Israel’s “escalate and de-escalate” strategy.
“I cannot recall a time, at least in recent memory, when an upsurge or escalation of tensions has led to a fundamental de-escalation and a significant stabilization of the situation,” a State Department official told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.
The biggest concern right now is that Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, will step in, the first official said. Iran has not yet intervened but would if it believed it stood to lose its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, the official added.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani on Monday warned of “dangerous consequences” from the Israeli attack.
Israel has already significantly weakened Hezbollah’s military capabilities over the past week, killing several senior commanders and severely impacting the group’s command and control structure, the first official said.
“We’ve probably taken the situation back to 20 years ago,” another official said of the overall impact of Israel’s operations against Hezbollah.
The Pentagon announced Monday that it was sending more US troops to the Middle East “out of an abundance of caution” as tensions in the region continue to rise.
The crisis adds importance to President Joe Biden’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, although hopes that he will be able to ease tensions are likely low given the failure of US efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Allies at a global conference in New York are scrambling to come up with “concrete ideas” to defuse a potentially destabilizing situation in the region. A senior State Department official declined to say whether the U.S. expects Israel to launch a ground invasion of Lebanon if those defusing efforts fail, but said it’s “important that everyone takes Israeli preparations seriously.”
“The pace or intensity of Israel’s attacks on any given day cannot be used to infer whether our efforts to persuade them to exercise restraint have been successful or unsuccessful,” the State Department official added.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari said Israel carried out strikes on 1,600 Hezbollah targets on Monday, aiming for long-range cruise missiles and heavy rockets capable of reaching deep inside Israel. Hagari said the weapons were hidden “in the centers of villages, inside civilian homes.”
The massive airstrikes have killed at least 492 people in Lebanon, including 35 children and 58 women, and injured at least 1,645, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.
The daily death toll is the country’s highest in 24 hours of conflict since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The Israel Defense Forces said Hezbollah fired more than 200 rockets at Israel on Monday, some of which were intercepted over Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city and the largest in northern Israel.
Israel has told the U.S. that the strikes are not aimed at all-out war. Rather, Israel’s goal is to allow 70,000 Israeli citizens who have been displaced since Hezbollah fired rockets and drones on Oct. 8 to return to their homes near the Lebanese border. The goal is a diplomatic solution through escalation, the Israeli official said.
However, the IDF has not ruled out a ground invasion, a large-scale operation that would likely require the call-up of significant reserve forces and the transfer of Israeli forces to the Lebanese border.
“Is the military ready?” Haghari asked rhetorically at a press conference on Monday. “Yes, the military is fully prepared and will do whatever is necessary to bring all our citizens safely back to our northern border.”
Officials said the Mossad and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign of blowing up pagers and walkie-talkies has undermined Hezbollah’s communications capabilities, especially since Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had urged his group in February to avoid using cell phones.
But even after suffering such a heavy blow, Hezbollah remains a more formidable opponent to Israel than Hamas in Gaza, with 150,000 rockets and missiles in its pre-war arsenal and a stockpile that has been boosted with Iranian backing.
The Israeli cabinet has declared a “state of emergency” for the entire country, authorising it to impose strict restrictions on civilian life. These restrictions, which include school closures and limits on public gatherings, are currently limited to northern Israel and Gaza suburbs. In a sign of how seriously the government is taking the situation, hospitals in northern Israel have been ordered to move patients to fortified areas.
Meanwhile, officials are waiting to see how Iran will respond, as Tehran has yet to mount a military response to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
Iranian President Massoud Pezechkian promised Monday that his country would still seek revenge.
“Ismail Haniyeh was our guest the day I was inaugurated as president,” Pezechkian told the U.N. “Israel attacked him and made him into a so-called martyr in order to escalate and destabilize the war in the region.”
