Israel warned on Monday that skirmishes along the Lebanese border could not continue as the war in Gaza has prompted increased hostilities by Iran-backed militias across the region.
Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s War Cabinet and a former military chief of staff, told the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, that the attacks by the Hezbollah militia from Lebanon required a response.
“Heightened aggression and increased attacks by Iranian-backed Hezbollah on Israel demand of Israel to remove such a threat from the civilian population of northern Israel,” Mr. Gantz said in a phone call, according to a statement from his office.
That echoed remarks made a day earlier by the current chief of staff of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who said on a visit to soldiers on the border with Lebanon that continued violence by the militia risked pushing his forces to make “very clear change” in the confrontation and “return both safety and a sense of security.”
The general did not indicate how Israel would achieve that objective.
The Israeli military has sought to focus on its goals in Gaza — freeing hostages and destroying Hamas — but the conflict has sparked fears it could draw in neighboring countries as the fighting stretched into its third month.
In a show of solidarity with Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, the powerful Hezbollah militia has launched repeated missile and drone attacks on army bases and other targets inside Israel, forcing the evacuation of civilians and prompting cross-border strikes by Israel. At the same time, the Houthi militia in Yemen — which is also backed by Iran — has made good on threats to step up its attacks against shipping in the Red Sea.
But a senior Hezbollah official, Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, said on Monday that some delegations were “foolishly” encouraging Hezbollah to expand the confrontations with Israel.
Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general, said Hezbollah has been firing off larger missiles in recent weeks as a warning, what he called “a rational policy to annoy but not to go to a fully-fledged war.”
Both sides are cognizant of an established choreography, analysts noted, but an errant shell or other mistake can spark a larger conflict and several incidents have come perilously close.
After Hezbollah increased the size of the weapons it has used, Israeli airstrikes in recent days have been the most concentrated yet, General Hanna said. And an Israeli shell killed the 80-year-old mayor of the southern village of Taybeh in his home, Lebanese news media reported on Monday.
H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident scholar on Middle East politics at the Carnegie Endowment, said “nobody wants escalation” or for the fighting to expand to a regional conflict. “Few actors think that it is a good idea because the costs would be tremendous,” he said, but added that the calculations can shift as violence anywhere in the region escalates.
The Houthis in Yemen posed another problem. They threatened during the weekend to step up attacks on ships bound for Israel transiting the Red Sea, and the French Navy said on Sunday that one of its frigates there had shot down two drones fired from Yemen.
The Houthis had already threatened Israeli shipping, but in a statement on social media on Saturday, Yahya Sarea, the militia spokesman, said it would step up its attacks to “prevent the passage of ships sailing to Israel” no matter their nationality, unless Gaza received badly needed food and medicine.
Houthi fighters are already holding a commercial vessel, the Galaxy Leader, that was hijacked last month with its 25-member crew. No crew members are Israeli, according to Galaxy Maritime, which owns the vessel, although an Israeli billionaire, Rami Ungar, at one point exercised control over the company.
Since the war in Gaza started, repeated attempts by the Houthis to hit Israel with rocket or drone attacks from Yemen have been thwarted by either the Israeli military or the U.S. Navy.
Euan Ward and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.
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