Hezbollah is NOT Hamas….
They ARE stronger and armed on a state wide level unlike the Hamas underground organisation….
Israel and Hezbollah have been picking at each other….
But NOT a full engagement….
A move by the Lebanon based group would place Israel in a Northern War and Southern armed conflict….
It is NOT a place President Biden, Other Middle East Countries or Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu provably wants to be in….
*Hamas is recruiting and regenerating among radicalised young Gaza men…..
It also includes a clip from a speech that Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, delivered Wednesday: “If a war is imposed on Lebanon, the resistance will fight without restraints, without rules, without limits,” he said.
The Israel-Lebanon border has been a battlefield since Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants overran southern Israel, triggering the war in Gazaand inspiring attacks by Iran-backed proxies from Iraq to Yemen.
Israeli forces and fighters from Hezbollah — the Iranian-aligned group that is Lebanon’s most dominant military and political force — have traded carefully calibrated blows, exchanging rocket, mortar and drone fire on a near-daily basis. While the violence has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border, it has, until now, remained relatively contained….
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the current phase of fighting against Hamas in Gaza is winding down, setting the stage for Israel to send more troops to its northern border to confront the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
The comments threatened to further heighten the tensions between Israel and Hezbollah at a time when they appear to be moving closer to war. Netanyahu also signaled that there is no end in sight for the grinding war in Gaza.
The Israeli leader said in a lengthy TV interview that while the army is close to completing its current ground offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, that would not mean the war against Hamas is over. But he said fewer troops would be needed in Gaza, freeing up forces to battle Hezbollah.
“We will have the possibility of transferring some of our forces north, and we will do that,”….
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Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, and opening a new front would raise the risk of a larger, region-wide war involving other Iranian proxies and perhaps Iran itself that could cause heavy damage and mass casualties on both sides of the border….
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American officials also have been pressing Netanyahu to spell out a clear post-war plan for Gaza. The U.S. has said it will not accept a long-term Israeli occupation of the territory.
Netanyahu spelled out a very different vision. He said the only way to guarantee Israel’s security is for Israel to maintain military control over the territory.
“There is no one else” capable of doing that, he said. But he said he is seeking a way to create a Palestinian “civilian administration” to manage day-to-day affairs in Gaza, hopefully with backing from moderate Arab countries. He ruled out any role for the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which was ousted from Gaza by Hamas in a violent 2007 takeover.
Netanyahu said the Israeli army several months ago looked into working with prominent Palestinian families in Gaza, but that Hamas immediately “destroyed them.” He said Israel is now looking at other options.
Netanyahu ruled out one option favored by some of his ultranationalist governing partners — re-settling Israelis in Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, ending a 38-year presence.
“The issue of settlement is not realistic,” he said. “I’m realistic.”
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Israeli feelings towards Hamas and those in Gaza ……
Like many Israelis, Mr. Zigdon blamed Hamas for embedding itself in residential areas, endangering Gaza’s civilians, while blurring the distinction himself between Hamas fighters and the general population, as if all were complicit.
Israelis remain gripped by the trauma of what happened on Oct. 7 — when Hamas-led gunmen surged across the border, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 more back to Gaza, according to Israeli officials. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
The pain, still raw, is increasingly overlaid with anger. Much of the collective Israeli psyche is cloistered in self-protective layers of indignation as Israel faces international opprobrium for its prosecution of the war and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Most Israelis seem to be aware that their military’s subsequent air and ground offensive in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians — many of them children, according to health officials in Gaza — and wrought widespread destruction on the coastal enclave. But they have also seen the videos of scores of people in civilian clothes looting and attacking residents of the rural Israeli villages during the Hamas raids. While Palestinian polls show broad support among Gazans for the Oct. 7 attack, some Palestinians have spoken out against the atrocities committed by Hamas and its allies that day….
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Many Israelis — both conservative and liberal — blame Hamas for starting the war and for embedding its fighters among the Gazan population, operating, according to the military, out of schools, hospitals and mosques, and in tunnels beneath Gazans’ homes.
Many also see Gaza’s civilians as complicit, at least ideologically, in the atrocities of Oct. 7, saying that they brought Hamas to power in the first place, in Palestinian elections in 2006, and that they had not expressed much remorse — though Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007 with little tolerance for any dissent, much less a new vote. As the war has dragged on, more Gazans have been willing to speak out against Hamas, risking retribution….
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For much of the Israeli public, this war is very different from previous Arab-Israeli conflicts, said Avi Shilon, an Israeli historian based in Tel Aviv, explaining the apparent indifference to the suffering of Palestinians. Unlike the much shorter wars of 1967 or 1973, when state armies fought state armies, this conflict is viewed more like the 1948 war surrounding the creation of modern Israel, or through the prism of the Nazi genocide in Europe, he said.
Mr. Shilon said he saw every unintended death as a “tragedy.” But the Oct. 7 assault — when attackers killed people in their homes, at a music rave, in roadside bomb shelters and at army bases — was broadly seen in Israel as being “just about killing Jews,” Mr. Shilon said, turning the ensuing war into a visceral battle: “Either us or them.”…
*Update…
Hamas appears to be accelerating its reconstitution effort in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is actively recruiting 18-year-olds and has attempted to conduct training for new recruits. Recruitment is one element of the second stage of reconstitution, regeneration. Reconstitution consists of two general tasks, reorganization and regeneration.