Was the U.S.-French Sept. 25 call for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah really a scheme to set up Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah and the top leadership of Hezbollah to be assassinated by Israel? That’s the implication of a report in TRT World, the national public broadcaster of Turkey, posted yesterday. The TRT report keys off a Sept. 30 report in Politico identifying White House envoys Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein telling Israeli officials behind closed doors that the U.S. backed Netanayhu’s plans to shift the military focus to the north while the White House said publicly that it favored a diplomatic resolution of the conflict.
“Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment—one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come,” Politico reported.
This rhetoric might seem oddly familiar. TRT identifies it as coming from the same ideology that gave us the Iraq war of 2003. McGurk, who wrote the Iraqi constitution during the U.S. occupation and helped to create the SDF in Syria; and Hochstein, an IDF veteran, are the two main ideologues behind it in the Biden Administration. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who had publicly advocated a ceasefire, said after Nasrallah had been confirmed killed, that “Lebanon, the region and the world is safer without him.”
