Israel’s war in Gaza threatens to spill into Lebanon and the region

TEL AVIV - Escalating strikes and counterstrikes along the border between Israel and Lebanon are raising fears of a possible new front for Israel, even as its fighters remain mired in bloody urban combat in Gaza to the south in its campaign to destroy Hamas.

Hezbollah fired more barrages at northern Israel on Wednesday in the latest in a string of attacks by Iranian-backed groups across the Middle East against Israeli and U.S. assets.

Hezbollah has lobbed scores of rockets and explosives-laden drones at Israel this week, including at a Greek Orthodox church, where two Israeli Christians were wounded.

Drones targeted the Egyptian resort city of Dahab in the Sinai Peninsula, the second such incident there in the past month. There was an explosion outside the Israeli Embassy in India’s capital, New Delhi. And an airstrike near Syria’s capital, Damascus, killed a senior officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The group has vowed that Israel will “pay.”

“We are now at a fork in the road,” Eylon Levy, spokesman for the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Wednesday. “Either Hezbollah backs off from the Israeli border, in line with U.N. Resolution 1701, or we will push it away ourselves.”

“Hezbollah and its Iranian warlord patrons are dragging Lebanon into a totally unnecessary war, into the war that Hamas started,” Levy said. “Our region does not deserve a broader war.”

On Tuesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was in “a multifront war,” in which the country had been attacked from “seven arenas” — Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran — and had responded in six.

Israeli media reported that Israel has not yet acted in Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have for weeks been firing missiles at Israel and at commercial vessels at sea, disrupting international shipping routes.

Iranian-supported militants in Lebanon and across the region have become more active since Oct. 7, when Hamas rampaged through Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages.

Hamas tried to involve Lebanon’s Hezbollah and militant groups in the West Bank and across the region to spark a regional war that would bring the Palestinian cause back to the center of the Middle East debate.

But when Israel struck back at Gaza, vowing to destroy Hamas, Hezbollah did not immediately join the fight. That puzzled the Israeli military, according to former security official Jacques Neriah; analysts were scrambling to assess the war’s parameters.

“What we know now is that Hezbollah engaged on Oct. 8, and gradually it became more and more daring, until it reached a situation of today, where it’s using all its weapons except the long-range weapons,” said Neriah, a former chief military intelligence analyst for Israel and a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s.

In recent weeks, Israel has evacuated 70,000 people from its northern border in addition to the 150,000 evacuated from its southern border with Gaza. In Lebanon, 120,000 people have fled their homes.

Three people were killed Tuesday night in what Lebanese media said was an Israeli airstrike in Bin Jbeil, a southern Lebanese town that Israel considers a Hezbollah stronghold. Australian media reported that one was an Australian citizen who was visiting his wife, with whom he planned to move to Australia. Australia’s Foreign Ministry was investigating the incident.

An Israeli military official did not claim the strike, but said the dead were two militants and the wife of one of them.

As tensions rise along Israel’s northern border, commanders are expanding operations in Gaza, moving deeper into the enclave’s center and south. But indications are mounting that the war will also include Lebanon, and potentially the wider region.

The Israel Defense Forces said it hit about 200 military targets in Gaza on Tuesday night, including in the Shejaiya district, where battles have raged in densely populated neighborhoods that Israel says seem to have been heavily booby-trapped.

An Israeli airstrike on a residential building near al-Amal hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis killed at least 20 people and wounded dozens more, the Gaza Health Ministry said.

The IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A graphic video shared by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which runs the hospital, showed bloodied men lying on the ground with clothes in tatters and body parts missing.

More than a quarter of Gazans are starving, the United Nations reported, and water shortages and mass displacement amid the collapse of the health-care system are aiding the rapid spread of diseases.

More than 21,100 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, according to Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant fatalities, but the majority of the dead are believed to be women and children.

[The world wants a respite for Gaza. Israel vows to keep fighting.]

The IDF has estimated that the death toll includes 8,000 combatants. More than 164 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the start of the war.

A war with Lebanon would no doubt add to that pain. Hezbollah is well trained, with an arsenal estimated at about 150,000 missiles.

Egypt and Qatar are floating deals to pause or end Israel’s Gaza campaign, potentially in return for the release of the estimated 130 hostages still being held in the enclave. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his foreign minister arrived in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss proposals that could include efforts to halt the displacement of Palestinians, to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and to reinstate regional security, according to Egyptian media reports.

Sigal Vishnetzer, from northern Israel’s Manara kibbutz — a closed military zone where 86 of 155 homes have been destroyed by fighting — says the only acceptable outcome is the return of security and the return of residents to their homes.

“We know that we will return after the war,” Vishnetzer told Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster. “We only hope that we will count in months, not years.”

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Mellen reported from Jerusalem. Miriam Berger in Jerusalem, Heba Mahfouz in Cairo, Hajar Harb in London and Hazem Balousha in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.