The checkpoint of the Lebanese Army soldiers, with a half-faded cedar flag on the walls of the sentry boxes, warns the driver and passengers that they are leaving one province to enter another. Nothing changes substantially in a landscape of gentle mountains, with the terrain sometimes white and sometimes covered by dense masses of pine trees – much more abundant than the few cedars – as they pass through the demarcation of Mount Lebanon, the heart and origin of the current Lebanese State, to enter the southern one.
The gesture of the soldiers to those who decide to continue on their way encloses in a glance the warning of the danger in an area also largely unknown to them where the Shiite militia Hezbollah hides in tunnels and launchers thousands of rockets and missiles aimed at the Zionist arch-enemy and which the IDF is hitting with increasing intensity.
This Saturday alone, Israeli military authorities reported having hit more than 120 times in different locations in the territorywhich is just fifty kilometres from Beirut, which was trying to return to some normality on Saturday after what happened this week. And Hezbollah has launched almost a hundred rockets towards its territory.
A small territory dominated by small, mostly Shiite populations – although, as in all of Lebanon, there have always been Maronite and Druze Christian groups there – which will end up bordering Israel and where Hezbollah imposes its law. And where the war has been going on for months – on October 8, 2023, hours after the incursion of Hamas’s Al Qassem brigades on Israeli soil, when Hezbollah decided to launch the first projectiles against northern Israel – even though the media attention has been on the Gaza Strip ever since.
However, judging by the announcements made by the Israeli authorities in recent days – the Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant, claimed that the war has entered “a new phase” and the heavy blows executed by Tel Aviv against the military structure of the pro-Iranian organisation – everything indicates that the worst is yet to come. The calls of the international community to preserve peace in Lebanon, the latest of which was that of the Secretary General of the UN, the Portuguese Antonio Guterres, have not made a dent in Israeli plans on the eve of the annual convening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the possibility of an all-out war on both sides of the blue line is an increasingly greater possibility.
The fact is that the number of victims in the country as a whole, including Hezbollah members and the civilian population, which continues to rise, is no longer the result of a small and precise number of surgical operations, but the first toll of an open war whose horizon no one in this country dares to face. The Lebanese Ministry of Health spoke yesterday evening of only 37 dead as a result of the Israeli bombings in the southern zone at the time of going to press.
Added to this are the four dozen people killed as a result of the synchronized explosions of the pagers and walkie talkies hacked by the Mossad in a masterful and macabre move worthy of a Hollywood movie – front companies, explosives implanted in the batteries – which left thousands of people injured in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and in the populous Dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold south of Beirut. The final blow of the week came on Friday, when an IDF F-35 knocked down the apartment building on the ground floor of which the brigade’s top brass, led until then by Ibrahim Akil, was hiding. Lebanese health authorities yesterday raised the death toll to 37, 66 wounded and two dozen missing.
Since the televised intervention of Hezbollah Secretary General Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday, in which he promised a “just” response to the chain of explosions – the attack on the leadership of the militia’s elite unit the day before yesterday had not yet taken place – and to continue the war until an agreement is reached for a ceasefire in Gaza, the pro-Iranian organisation has not made any further public statements on the escalation of the last few hours.
Lebanese media such as L’Orient Le Jour reported on Saturday morning that after the series of attacks in Beirut, Beqaa and the south, Tel Aviv had granted Hezbollah a sort of truce of several days to accept an American proposal and end its attacks on northern Israel and allow the return of more than 100,000 inhabitants forced to leave their homes. The Israeli armed forces announced new restrictions to avoid the risk of more projectiles fired from Lebanese territory hitting them.
In the absence of any further intervention from its leadership, the Shiite party continues to convey the message that, despite the success of Israeli operations and their technological inferiority to Israel, they must continue to resist, because, ultimately, resistance is the raison d’être of a structure created by the Islamic Republic of Iran against the Israeli presence on Lebanese soil in 1982.
At this time of uncertainty, with a new day of severe bombing by Israeli forces on southern Lebanon and the response, neutralized by the Israeli defensive system, of the pro-Iranian militia against Israel, the big question is whether Israel will again penetrate with its soldiers on Lebanese soil or will avoid a temptation that could unleash a war of unknown dimensions and whether Hezbollah will put all its cards on the line against its enemy with or without the support of Tehran.