The U.S. was concerned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would use the Lebanon front as a means to ensure his political survival, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. According to the report, U.S. President Joe Biden tasked his administration officials with preventing a full-blown war from breaking out between Israel and Hezbollah.
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The post quoted two sources who said that American officials had warned Israel in private conversations against escalating the fight on the Lebanon border after Defense Intelligence Agency's assessment that Israel would struggle to succeed in a war against Hezbollah while forces spread thin amid Gaza war, the report said.
“It is in no one’s interest — not Israel’s, not the region’s, not the world’s — for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza,” State Department Spokesperson Mathew Miller said before Blinken's departure from Washington on Thursday. But that view is not uniformly held within Israel’s government.
The Post said that U.S. officials thought a full-blown war could "surpass the bloodshed of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war on account of Hezbollah’s substantially larger arsenal of long-range and precision weaponry."
“The number of casualties in Lebanon could be anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 and entail a massive evacuation of all of northern Israel,” Bilal Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, told the paper.
In the report, the Post noted that the conflict between Israel and the Iran-Backed group was continuing to grow after Hezbollah fired 40 rockets at Israel on Saturday in what they claimed was a retaliation for the assassination in Beirut of Senior Hamas member Saleh al-Arouri last week.
Tens of thousands of Israelis have been displaced from their homes in northern Israel amid Hezbollah fire that began on October 8, soon after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel.
According to the report, some in the administration say that Netanyahu's statements that there must be "fundamental change," along Lebanon's border with Israel is mere bluster aimed at extracting concessions from the Islamist terror group, while others that Netanyahu's political career could come to an end after the war in Gaza which would incentivize him to broaden the conflict in the north.