The Lebanese live hours of intense anticipation, glued to television screens to follow the news, fearing that the war will spread from the Gaza Strip to their country, which has been mired in political and economic crises for 4 years.
Their attitude these days is asking: “Will war happen in our country? Where? And when?”
While observers believe that Hezbollah planned “thought-out clashes” across the border between Lebanon and Israel to keep Israeli forces “busy,” experts who spoke to Sky News Arabia ruled out the possibility of the ongoing war expanding to Lebanon, unless Israel crosses “red lines.” While an American intelligence document suggested that Hezbollah would not launch a major attack on Israel.
Obsessions 2006
These days, the concerns of the war that took place between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 bring back to the minds of the Lebanese, which destroyed their homes and infrastructure in their areas, cut off connections between cities and led to hundreds of casualties.
Laila, a resident of the border areas with Israel, told Sky News Arabia: “We cannot stay away from the television screens. We watch all the news to know our fate.”
She added: “We fled and left our home and our town, Shebaa, because of the bombing it was subjected to a few days ago. We spend long hours in front of the television at the home of one of our relatives, to find out when we will return to our home.”
As Ibrahim, who lives in Beirut, says to Sky News Arabia: “Yes, we live in the fears and horrors of the July 2006 war, and we watch the news day and night.”
He explains: “I started looking for a house to rent in northern Lebanon, where there is no Hezbollah presence, while residents of the border villages search for houses to rent in the capital and its environs.”
Samer from the Bekaa explains: “We do not want to repeat the same scene: the missile bombing on the Bekaa border roads at dawn every day in 2006 and the fall of innocent victims here and there.”
Israeli Defense Minister: Hezbollah has made a decision to participate in the fighting
Will the war break out and spread to various Lebanese regions?
Retired Brigadier General, researcher in strategic affairs, Hisham Jaber, believes that the Israeli response to Hamas has not been completed yet, despite strong indications of launching a ground attack in the Gaza Strip.
In an interview with Sky News Arabia, Jaber said, “Israel is intending to develop a strategy to storm the Gaza Strip after dividing it into squares and separating some of them from others, and to restore comprehensive control over the Gaza envelope area.”
Jaber said, “The recurrence of clashes, even in a limited manner, on Lebanon’s borders with Israel is normal. It has developed into the level of limited, mutual clashes with Hezbollah, which said that it does not take the initiative but rather responds to Israel, and the latter responds in response.”
He continued: “Hezbollah has not yet opened the southern Lebanon front, and will not open it except in two cases: the first, if Israel begins large-scale battles, then it will inevitably respond with hundreds or thousands of missiles, and at that time the war will ignite, and the second, in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran, then it is certain that all… The fronts will be opened, including the southern Lebanese front.”
Jaber considered that “the talk that Hezbollah will enter the battle by opening the southern front as soon as the ground attack on Gaza is incorrect, because the war will then become a regional war, and there is a great responsibility on it in this case, internally and externally.”
The Israeli army: Any time Hezbollah fires, we will respond
No war
In the same context, a member of the Lebanese Sovereign Front, political analyst Bechara Khairallah, ruled out the outbreak of a battle between Israel and Hezbollah.
He added to Sky News Arabia: “The equation of hitting a shell and responding with a shell or missile between Israel and Hezbollah proves that it concluded an undeclared peace with Israel after demarcating the maritime borders with Lebanon.”
He continued: “There is also a theoretical demarcation of borders between the United States and Iran, and aircraft carriers are stationed in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. Iran understood the message and conveyed it to Hezbollah.”
According to Khairallah’s opinion, “The battle has been going on for two weeks without Hezbollah directly intervening in it, and this is evidence, in my opinion, that it will not interfere in the war currently taking place in the Gaza Strip.”
He concluded: “We refuse to involve Lebanon in the battle, knowing that the skirmishes on the border are a violation of Resolution 1701 and Lebanese sovereignty, and this is the greatest evidence that the decision to make war and peace has been hijacked from the hands of the Lebanese government by Hezbollah.”
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2023-10-22 10:30:34
