‘It’s Us or Them’: Prospect of Israel-Hezbollah War Rises as Iran-Backed Terrorists Ramp Up Drone Strikes

June 5, 2024 3:45 pm

An explosives-laden drone launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon injured 11 people in a northern Israeli town on Wednesday, further raising the specter of a new front opening amid rapidly escalating tensions between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group.

Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, took responsibility for launching “several projectiles” at Israel, it said, including two that hit a soccer field in the Druze town of Hurfeish, where sirens were not activated. At least one person was critically wounded and a further 10 evacuated to a hospital. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was investigating why the incoming projectile alert sirens did not sound.

Early reports from military sources indicate the drone attacks occurred in quick succession, with the second appearing to intentionally target emergency responders rushing to aid victims of the initial blast, a tactic repeatedly used by Hezbollah terrorists during the current conflict.

The attack came hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Israel was prepared with an “intensely powerful” response to Hezbollah.

“Whoever thinks that he will attack us and that we will stand idly by is gravely mistaken,” Netanyahu said. He made his remarks during a tour of Israel’s charred north 48 hours after projectiles from Hezbollah had sparked several massive fires in the area, burning entire villages. More than 4,500 missiles and drones have been fired from Lebanon since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war to the Jewish state’s south in Gaza.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog offered prayers for the full recovery of the victims of the Hurfeish attack.

“The world needs to wake up and understand that Israel has no alternative but to safeguard its citizens, and should not be shocked when Israel responds aggressively,” Herzog said.

Israel has stepped up its own attacks against Hezbollah, targeting “significant assets” as well as senior commanders of the group, the IDF said.

According to diplomatic sources, the US and France have been engaging in shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Lebanon for several months now, in an effort to develop a potential negotiated resolution to the conflict.

The key goal is to facilitate the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s presence to over 6 miles north of the Israeli border, beyond the Litani River, and to allow either the Lebanese military or an international peacekeeping force to move into the vacated area along the border. As part of the proposed framework, Israel and Lebanon would also work to resolve longstanding border demarcation disputes between the two nations, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But Sarit Zehavi — a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma, a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — told The Algemeiner that anything short of destroying Hezbollah would result in a “massacre” of a scale larger than Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

“Everyone understands the cost of war here, but at the same time everybody understands that if it will end up with a ceasefire that would take us back to Oct. 6, this will mean another massacre of Israelis by Hezbollah since Hamas actually replicated the Hezbollah plan to occupy the Galilee,” Zehavi said.

The overwhelming sentiment, she said, is that authorities are failing to take adequate measures, both offensively and defensively.

Zehavi pointed to the lack of bomb shelters in the area and the threat of anti-tank missiles that has become a daily reality over the past eight months, with Hezbollah launching strikes that cannot be intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system and that often arrive without rocket siren warnings.

Compounding concerns, she said, is an alarming surge in attack drone activity from Hezbollah, especially over the last two months, with numbers sharply increasing month-over-month.

“Hezbollah is deliberately escalating the situation to try to drag Israel into war,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “I believe this was Hezbollah’s aim from the beginning. It’s not deterred; it’s not interested in a ceasefire. If there will be a ceasefire in Gaza, Hezbollah will follow, but only in order to recover and to execute a massacre at its most convenient timing.”

More than 80,000 Israelis evacuated Israel’s north in October and have since been unable to return to their homes. The majority of those spent the past eight months residing in hotels in safer areas of the country.

One of them, Avi Vanunu, said that unless Israel embarked on a full-scale invasion of Lebanon soon, returning home to his border town of Kiryat Shmona wouldn’t be possible “even in ten years’ time.”

“I don’t even know if my house is still standing or if it was hit by a rocket,” he told The Algemeiner. “Tonight’s attack [on Hurfeish] just proves: It’s us or them.”

The only comfort he took, Vanunu said, was in the fact that Hurfeish was a Druze village, with many residents who had served as Border Police officers and in the IDF in senior positions.

“This won’t pass easily,” he said. “Just look at how they reacted after that Druze boy was kidnapped.”

Vanunu was referring to a Nov. 2022 incident in which the body of a Druze Israeli teen was stolen by terrorists from a hospital in the Palestinian city of Jenin, prompting widespread anger and several revenge attacks from members of the Druze community, including kidnapping Palestinian laborers in Israel and throwing explosive devices in West Bank towns.

Maj. Shadi Khalloul (res), an expert on Hezbollah and Lebanon, called the efforts to push Hezbollah away to past the Litani River “a joke.”

“It’s deceiving Israeli citizens again. It’s dangerous. We should fully destroy [Hezbollah],” Khalloul, who also serves as the president of the Aramaic Christian Galilee Center, told The Algemeiner, warning that if Israel failed to do so, the terror group would be prepared to “destroy Israel together with a nuclear Iran.”