The deadly explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon this week dealt another blow to President Joe Biden\u2019s beleaguered efforts to reduce tensions in the Middle East, even as his top diplomats were present in the region reciting calls for calm.<\/p>\n
The absence of a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah has been touted by U.S. officials as a core achievement of the past 11 months amid failures to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and halt the enormous civilian death toll and restrictions on humanitarian aid in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n
But with Israel moving forces north and flying warplanes over Beirut, Hezbollah calling Israel\u2019s apparent sabotage of electronic devices an \u201cact of war,\u201d and rockets and missiles flying in both directions, Washington\u2019s grip on the crisis appears more tenuous than ever.<\/p>\n
The detonation of the communications devices on Tuesday and Wednesday killed at least 37 people in Lebanon, including Hezbollah operatives, children and health-care workers, and coincided with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken\u2019s trip to Egypt, where he urged \u201call parties\u201d to avoid any steps that could \u201cfurther escalate the conflict that we\u2019re trying to resolve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s effort to urge de-escalation has been met with increasingly brazen assaults by its ally Israel and deadly rocket and missile volleys by Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Houthi militants \u2014 all of which threaten ongoing efforts to forge a deal to pause the fighting in Gaza and secure the release of hostages taken from Israel a year ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecretaries of state should travel to the region in a crisis, but the risk you run is eventually becoming part of the political furniture: You get taken for granted,\u201d said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who has advised both Republican and Democratic administrations. \u201cUnless you husband your currency, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Arab states look at American officials as part of the furniture. They get used to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
U.S. diplomats hold little sway over Iran and Hezbollah but wield significant leverage over Israel, the single largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid. But U.S. officials argue that it is Washington\u2019s unyielding support for Israel that has prevented a full-scale assault on the Jewish state by Iran and its proxy forces amid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s controversial military campaign in Gaza.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo far, we have been successful in keeping it from turning into an all-out regional war, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re going to continue to try to pursue,\u201d State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday.<\/p>\n
Some critics say the Biden administration\u2019s logic is backward. \u201cPromising Netanyahu arms and protection whether or not he de-escalates has, unsurprisingly, not persuaded him to de-escalate,\u201d said Harrison Mann, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who resigned from the military earlier this year in protest of U.S. policy toward Israel. \u201cHopefully it\u2019s at least racked up frequent-flier points for the envoy and his team.\u201d<\/p>\n
Matthew Miller said no conclusions should be drawn from the frequent travel of U.S. officials to the region and Israeli escalations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are various escalations that happen in this conflict \u2014 not on a daily basis, but a pretty regular basis \u2014 and there are U.S. officials traveling on a pretty regular basis,\u201d he said. \u201cIn college, I was taught correlation is not causation.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the crux of the conflict is Israel\u2019s ongoing military campaign in Gaza following Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 cross-border assault, which killed more than 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of more than 240 hostages. Israel\u2019s ensuing military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, and brought about famine and polio in parts of the enclave.<\/p>\n
In solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel on Oct. 8, resulting in routine exchanges of fire between the Lebanese militant group and Israel \u2014 and the displacement of tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah said his group would not stop until Israel ended the war in Gaza. He added that detonating explosives in civilian areas \u2014 including supermarkets, houses and crowded streets \u2014 was a \u201ccrime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israeli authorities, who rarely discuss operations in other countries, have declined to comment on whether Israel was responsible. U.S. officials have acknowledged that Israel was behind the attack but insist that the Israelis did not inform the United States about its specifics beforehand, only afterward using intelligence channels.<\/p>\n
The Israeli government has come under intense pressure to create conditions that would allow displaced Israelis to return safely to their homes, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday said the military had entered \u201ca new phase of the war\u201d focused on its northern border.<\/p>\n
Some former officials surmised that the exploitation of the communications devices was designed to paralyze Hezbollah communications in the event of an imminent full-scale war \u2014 a path Israel has not yet taken.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy best guess is the potential exposure of the devices by Hezbollah made Israel trigger the attack before they really wanted to,\u201d said Frank Lowenstein, a Middle East adviser to former secretary of state John F. Kerry.<\/p>\n
An alternative theory, Aaron David Miller said, is that Hezbollah had not discovered the plot but Netanyahu \u201capproved the operation to boost his own political fortunes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Netanyahu\u2019s actions should not be tolerated. \u201cTime and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu has ignored the Biden Administration\u2019s concerns, taking escalatory action without even conferring with the U.S.,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cHe\u2019s repeatedly demonstrated that his priorities lie in his own political self-interest \u2014 not in that of his people, who are calling for a ceasefire and a return of the hostages.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whatever transpired, U.S. officials have maintained that they were not told about the operation ahead of time and played no role in it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were not involved in [Tuesday\u2019s] incidents or [Wednesday\u2019s] in any way. And I don\u2019t have anything more to share,\u201d White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. Kirby insisted that U.S. officials continue to believe there is a \u201cdiplomatic path forward\u201d to a cease-fire in Gaza and a truce between Hezbollah and Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to see the war end. And everything we\u2019ve been doing since the beginning has been designed to prevent the conflict from escalating,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But talks between Israel and Hamas have been deadlocked for weeks over Israeli demands for a continued military presence along the Egypt-Gaza border and Hamas demands over the ratio of Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for the hostages.<\/p>\n
Several weeks ago, U.S. officials said they planned to present a \u201ctake it or leave it\u201d proposal to Israel and Hamas that if the two sides fail to accept would mark the end of the American-led negotiations.<\/p>\n
That proposal hasn\u2019t been made, said Aaron David Miller, the Middle East expert, because U.S. officials fear that if rejected, it would unleash the \u201cbigger strategic nightmare\u201d of an all-out war.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite the odds of not succeeding,\u201d he said, \u201ckeeping this going is critically important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Claire Parker in Cairo, Missy Ryan and Abigail Hauslohner contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The deadly explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon this week dealt another blow to President Joe Biden\u2019s beleaguered efforts to reduce tensions in the Middle East, even as his top diplomats were present in the region reciting calls for calm. The absence of a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah has been touted by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}