The tragedy of 12 Druze children dying in a missile strike yesterday in the town of Majdal Shams, near Israel’s northern border within Lebanon, has triggered a new run-up to a full-scale war with Hezbollah, and possibly Lebanon and Iran. There’s little question that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government means to engage shortly in that full-scale war—as Netanyahu announced in Washington; the only question, it seems, is what day to start it.
While Hezbollah has fired missiles into Israel, which they claim is in support of the Palestinians in Gaza, they have been much more forthcoming than Israel in declaring their strikes. Were they to divert from their military targets, it seems most unlikely that they would choose to attack a Druze town. Regardless, Israeli officials immediately blamed Hezbollah, vowing revenge. Netanyahu declared that Hezbollah “will pay a heavy price for this attack, one that it has not paid so far,” and Foreign Minister Israel Katz stated, as reported by Channel 12: “There is no doubt that Hezbollah has crossed all the red lines here, and the response will reflect that. We are nearing the moment in which we face an all-out war.”
Lost in the news coverage yesterday is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated their fighter jets fired three missiles at a field hospital embedded within a girls school in Gaza, where 4,000 Palestinians were sheltering. Thirty were killed. The IDF said it hit a Hamas “command and control center.”
Overnight, the IDF’s air force began their revenge, striking “a series of Hezbollah terror targets … both deep inside Lebanese territory and in southern Lebanon, including weapons caches and terrorist infrastructure in the areas of Chabriha, Borj El Chmali, and Beqaa, Kfarkela, Rab El Thalathine, Khiam, and Tayr Harfa.” Al Jazeera reported explosions in Tyre, Lebanon.
UN special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert and commander of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon Aroldo Lázaro released a joint statement, today, calling for “the parties to exercise maximum restraint and to put a stop to the ongoing intensified exchanges of fire.”
Haaretz reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was unsuccessful in their attempt to organize a meeting with several relatives of the dead Druze children. Their report, unattributed, stated that senior members of Netanyahu’s office contacted a few relatives, and were told that the families prefer not to meet the prime minister.
