David Horovltz
Times of Israel, Feb. 14, 2024
“One way or another, both Israel’s political and military chiefs are adamant, however, that the IDF will tackle Hamas in Rafah — the terror group’s last major largely intact stronghold, and the presumed hiding place of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar and most of the hostages.”
1. The war in Gaza is far from over. The potential for war in the north is growing day by day.IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said Tuesday that reservists were being withdrawn from Gaza and sent back to their normal lives but would be needed again — and he was thinking of both fronts. The IDF, he specified, is “preparing for war” against the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has derided various foreign proposals that would compel him to pull his forces further back from the border, and is gradually escalating his attacks — barrages of 30 rockets a time on two days last week, intermittent targeting of a key IDF base, rocket fire that badly hurt a mother and her 15-year-old son in Kiryat Shimona on Tuesday, and deadly fire on Safed Wednesday morning, prompting what the IDF called “widespread” retaliatory airstrikes.
It’s not clear what red line Hezbollah would have to cross for Israel to significantly escalate its response. Political and military chiefs have intimated that an attack on a strategic site, or an attack with what are deemed to be major civilian casualties, or a substantive barrage on Haifa, might constitute the breaking point.
It remains the case that Israel would rather avoid war on the northern front, and certainly for so long as it is preoccupied with Gaza. But it is also the case that, with three divisions rather than the usual one now deployed in the north, the IDF has more forces poised for action on the northern border than it has fighting in Gaza right now.
2. Global pressure on Israel to end its campaign to dismantle Hamas is growing by the day.
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