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In the largest strike since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Hezbollah bombed an Israeli Defense Force reconnaissance facility on Mount Hermon in the occupied Golan Heights of Syria.
Carried out on Monday, the strike “led to the destruction of the targeted devices and the outbreak of large fire around them,” a Hezbollah spokesman told Al Jazeera.
The act, the spokesman said, was in response to targeted Israeli assassinations of Hezbollah commander Mohammed Naame Nasser on July 3rd, and engineer Maytham Mustafa al-Attar on July 7th.
The Cradle reports that mere hours before Hezbollah’s drones struck the reconnaissance base on Mount Hermon, the defense minister Yoav Gallant was at the facility addressing the IDF stationed there, vowing “to continue fighting Hezbollah even if a ceasefire takes effect in Gaza”.
The Israeli army’s 91st Division in the Ayelet Barracks and military sites in Galilee were also struck by Hezbollah rockets in the hours before the attack on Mount Hermon, during which 4 IDF soldiers were injured, two critically so.
The tit-for-tat retaliations are part and parcel of a deteriorating security situation that no one is attempting to disarm. WaL reported last week that White House officials were recently in Beirut to warn Lebanese ministers about their fear that they can’t control Tel Aviv and Netanyahu, whose now-reduced cabinet has already approved a plan for a major operation in southern Lebanon.
News of such an operation has brought out calls from Iranian officials that Tehran is “not interested” in a wider war in the Near East, but that the government would support Hezbollah with “all means,” reported the Financial Times. The Iranians added that the United States should exert pressure to reign in Israel.
“There would be a chance of expansion of the war to the whole region, in which all countries, including Iran, would become engaged,” said Kamal Kharrazi, foreign affairs adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, listing off Ansarallah in Yemen, the IRGC in Iran, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “In that situation, we would have no choice but to support Hezbollah by all means”.
“The expansion of war is not in the interest of anyone—not Iran or the US,” he added.
A serious administration in Washington D.C. would, considering the recent election of a new moderate regime in Iran, seriously engage Tehran to the end of attempting to control a situation that bears all the conditions for a brutal unlimited war between two factions with decades of mutual hatred.
However both US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller and White House Nat. Security Spokesman John Kirby have ruled out resuming any dialogue with Iran “just based on the fact that they’ve elected a new president,” the latter said.
Since October 7th, 2023, there have been over 4,400 rocket, missile, and other stand-off attacks by Israel and Hezbollah combined, according to a report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a national security think tank that estimates the paramilitary group to have a stockpile of 120,000 to 200,000 short-range, guided ballistic missiles, intermediate-range unguided ones, and a variety of rockets.
Qais al-Khazali, leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, part of the Iraqi army’s militia groups known as the PMF, said in a televised speech on Monday that if the US were to assist Israel in attacking Hezbollah directly, “then America should know that it will put all its interests in the region, particularly in Iraq, at risk and make them a target”.
Meanwhile, Lebanese Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah warned in late June of a war “without rules or ceilings” in the event of a full-scale Israeli offensive against the Lebanese militia, threatening Cyprus by name. The easternmost EU member has a bilateral defense cooperation agreement with Tel Aviv, and Nasrallah suggested that if any attacks were permitted to be launched from Cypriot airstrips, then the EU too would be drawn into a wider war. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Kamal Kharrazi, security advisor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said Iran will be forced to support Hezbollah with “all means”. PC: Tasmin News Agency, Siamek Ebrahimi
