The News
An Israeli strike in central Beirut on Thursday killed 22 people and injured more than 200 others, the deadliest attack on the city so far in the year-long conflict.
The political party and militant group Hezbollah said the strikes unsuccessfully targeted one of its top officials. Israel has successfully targeted others, assassinating the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah last month. The Israeli prime minister recently said “Nasrallah’s replacement, and his replacement’s replacement” were killed too.
Israel’s escalated attacks have come at huge cost to the Lebanese people, upwards of a million of whom have been displaced. The Beirut strike took place with no warning, the BBC reported, while Israel has not commented.
SIGNALS
Israel’s focus may no longer be on returning citizens to their homes
Israel didn’t seem to target the center of Beirut during the 2006 war, wrote the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, who was on the ground at the time, in a post questioning Israel’s aims in Lebanon. The scale of the Israeli assault seems to suggest it is going beyond its original stated goal, to return Israeli civilians to their homes in the country’s north, he noted: “Israel’s tactical successes against Hezbollah have encouraged some to think that there is a chance to reshape the region by severely damaging or destroying all Israel’s enemies,” Bowen said.
Israel is winning the battle against Hezbollah — but winning the war looks unlikely
Israel doubted its chances of pulling off a successful invasion against Hezbollah after the brutal 2006 war in Lebanon, but the IDF has achieved “supremacy” on the ground within the space of just 11 days and looks set to “finish all or most of its invasion” in the next few weeks, The Jerusalem Post reported. Israel’s combination of aerial assaults and artillery bombardment shows it learned more significantly from that war than did Hezbollah, ABC’s global affairs editor wrote. But Israel is ultimately marching toward “further entanglement” rather than victory over Hezbollah, a columnist argued in The New Statesman: Hezbollah has tens of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers, and ordinary Lebanese — many of whom view Hezbollah favorably — will blame Israel for their country’s destruction, he wrote.
Israel’s military objectives could change
Israel’s military success so far means it is likely to keep going until returns diminish, a Western official told the Financial Times. A former national security adviser, meanwhile, told the outlet he believed Israel’s objective was to weaken rather than eradicate Hezbollah, and then push for a political solution that would prevent the group from returning to southern Lebanon. “But in Lebanon, you know when and where you start. But you never know when and where you will finish,” he added. The IDF knows it has a narrow “window of opportunity” to complete a ground offensive as winter approaches and international pressure steps up, but still, “no one can say when the time will come to exit,” Haaretz reported.