Israeli defense chief heads to D.C. as Hezbollah escalates threats

BEIRUT - Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant arrived in Washington on Sunday for meetings with U.S. officials amid growing fears that border clashes between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah could escalate into all-out war.

Hezbollah released a video message Saturday night threatening to attack crucial Israeli buildings if a full-scale conflict were to break out in Lebanon. The video appears to display coordinates near a central Israeli airport, two power plants, a nuclear research center, a cargo port and a gas field.

It also includes a clip from a speech that Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, delivered Wednesday: “If a war is imposed on Lebanon, the resistance will fight without restraints, without rules, without limits,” he said.

The Israel-Lebanon border has been a battlefield since Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants overran southern Israel, triggering the war in Gaza and inspiring attacks by Iranian-backed proxies from Iraq to Yemen.

Israeli forces and fighters from Hezbollah - the Iranian-aligned group that is Lebanon’s most dominant military and political force - have traded carefully calibrated blows, exchanging rocket, mortar and drone fire on a near-daily basis. While the violence has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border, it has, until now, remained relatively contained.

But the scope and pace of attacks have increased significantly in recent weeks, matched by sharper threats from Israeli and Hezbollah officials, who both say they are prepared for war - a nightmare scenario that officials in Europe, Washington and across the region fear would devastate Lebanon, threaten major Israeli cities and consume the Middle East.

“We have been pursuing a diplomatic resolution to try to make clear that there should be no further escalation, and that’s what we’ll continue to pursue,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters in a briefing last week, as U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein made another visit to the region to urge restraint.

Yet hope is waning that Washington’s diplomatic scramble can succeed. Western and Lebanese officials have expressed concern during the past months over the slow pace of negotiations aimed at resolving the border dispute - held up by Hezbollah and Israeli intransigence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under growing domestic pressure to drive militants from the border and allow displaced residents to return to their homes in Israel’s north; Hezbollah has said it will keep fighting in Lebanon’s south until a cease-fire is reached in Gaza, a prospect that appears to grow more distant by the day.

Once the “intense phase of the war” is over in Gaza, Netanyahu said on Israeli television Sunday, “we will have the opportunity to move some forces to the north.”

“One rash move - one miscalculation - could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border, and frankly, beyond imagination,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said Friday. “The people of the region and the people of the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.”

Lebanon is already a country on the brink, ruled by a weak caretaker government and ravaged by an economic crisis that has decimated the banking system and left much of the population in poverty.

On June 12, Hezbollah announced that an Israeli strike had killed Taleb Sami Abdullah, the highest-ranking commander killed since Oct. 7. Senior Hezbollah official Hachem Saffieddine vowed Wednesday that the group would respond by intensifying its operations “in severity, strength, quantity and quality.”

The Israel Defense Forces reported drone attacks from Lebanon on Sunday, targeting an IDF outpost and an army base in the north.

During his visit to Washington, Gallant is set to discuss developments in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as efforts to return the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, his office said in a statement. Gallant will meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials.

“The United States is our most important and central ally,” Gallant said before departing on Saturday night. “Our ties are crucial and perhaps more important than ever, at this time.”

His trip comes five days after Netanyahu accused Washington of delaying weapons shipments to Israel, comments White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called “perplexing.” Defending those remarks at a cabinet meeting Sunday, Netanyahu said: “My job is to do everything to ensure that our heroic fighters receive the arms they need.”

Opening a second major front in Lebanon would place further strain on the Israeli military, which is still engaged in heavy fighting with Hamas in north and central Gaza, even as it says it is close to achieving its objectives in the southern city of Rafah. Hezbollah has a more professional army and more advanced weaponry than Hamas, having battled Israel to a bloody stalemate in two previous wars, in 1996 and 2006.

The group caught Israel off guard last week when it published drone footage of an Israeli military base at the port of Haifa, exposing possible vulnerabilities in the country’s vaunted air defense system. The video listed multiple potential targets, including Israel’s main airport, Ben Gurion, power plants in Ashkelon and Hadera, a plutonium-based facility in Dimona, the Leviathan gas field, a large natural gas field in the Mediterranean Sea, and Ashdod, home to a cargo port.

A full-on conflict between Israel and Lebanon would likely spread quickly across the region, analysts say, triggering responses from Hezbollah’s allies in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran - described by Tehran as the “axis of resistance.” On Saturday, an article in the Hezbollah-aligned newspaper al-Akhbar quoted Kazem al-Fartus, an Iraqi militia leader, saying that if the “presence of fighters from Iraq in southern Lebanon is required, we will be on the first lines.”

For years, Israeli officials have publicly warned that the next war with Hezbollah would lead to widespread destruction in Lebanon and its capital, Beirut. Though such warnings have increased since Oct. 7, they have largely been dismissed by Lebanese officials and much of the public as political posturing for domestic consumption in Israel.

But alarm grew this weekend after an article in the British newspaper the Telegraph, published without a byline and attributed to anonymous “whistleblowers,” reported Hezbollah had weapons caches stored at Beirut’s international airport. The article was picked up by Arab newspapers, sparking panic in Lebanon that this summer could see a repeat of 2006, when Israel bombed the airport in the early days of the war.

Lebanon’s Air Transport Union condemned the article as “deception and lies aimed at endangering Beirut Airport and its workers, all of whom are civilians, and those passing through it, all of whom are civilians.”

The union put out a call for Arab and foreign media to visit Beirut airport “with camera crews and verify for themselves. Otherwise, we consider that what is being promoted by suspicious media is incitement to kill us.”

Here’s what to know

• Footage that was widely circulated and verified by Reuters showed a man strapped to the hood of an Israeli military vehicle during a Saturday raid in the Wadi Burqin area of the occupied West Bank. Two witnesses told The Washington Post the man was an injured Palestinian detained during the raid; the IDF said he was a suspect wounded in an exchange of fire. Tying him to the jeep was “in violation of orders and standard operating procedures,” the IDF added, saying “the incident will be investigated and dealt with accordingly.”

• The Israeli military’s daily 11-hour pause on an aid corridor in southern Gaza has not helped deliver more resources to the area, Cindy McCain, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told Al-Monitor. “We’ve been shot at, and we’ve been rocketed. So as far as we can tell, there’s no difference at all,” McCain said.

• Massive crowds of demonstrators turned out in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to call for the ouster of Netanyahu and demand that Israel reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas to free the hostages in Gaza.

Melnick reported from London and Masih from Seoul. Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut and Alon Rom in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.