US stopped Israel launching Hezbollah war in October based on false alarm – report

In the opening days of the war, the US frantically tried to reach senior Israeli officials huddled to plan a major strike on Hezbollah to tell them they were not acting rationally and relying on bad intelligence, according to a US report Wednesday.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan eventually managed to pass a dictated note to Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer warning him against launching a preemptive strike against Hezbollah on October 11, according to the Atlantic, which provided further revelations on the 90-minute panic in Israel that evening over a suspected invasion by the Iran-backed terror group.

Without providing sources, The Atlantic reported that top Biden administration officials were persuading the government to avoid launching a preemptive strike on Hezbollah when Dermer informed Sullivan that Hezbollah paragliders had flown across the border — similar to Hamas’s October 7 massacre days earlier — and fired shots at a funeral.

Meanwhile, more than 2 million Israelis were sent to shelters over false sirens in northern communities warning of drone attacks on the evening of October 11. Fears were fueled by media reports that 15-20 drones from Lebanon supposedly crossed into Israeli territory.

The cabinet was poised to approve a preemptive strike on Hezbollah, but the claims of a Hezbollah infiltration could not be backed by the CIA or the US military, The Atlantic reported.

With Israel still reeling from Hamas terrorists storming across the Gaza border that Saturday and massacring at least 1,200 Israelis in border towns, the prospect of a similarly murderous mass invasion by Hezbollah along the northern border sparked panic in a country on edge.

Early reports indicate dozens of drones launched from Lebanon at Israel on the evening of October 11, 2023; they proved to be false (Red Alert Screenshot via X)

Israeli fighter jets were already in the air when US President Joe Biden managed to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down at the last minute, according to a Wall Street Journal report in December.

‘Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t’

The Atlantic also shared quotes from a January 8 meeting between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who expressed interest in normalization with Israel on the condition that Jerusalem would commit to allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state. A Saudi official described The Atlantic’s account of the conversation as “incorrect.”

MBS reportedly also told Blinken during the meeting in Saudi Arabia he would not need the Israelis to commit to a total halt on counterterrorism raids in Gaza in exchange for a normalization deal.

“They can come back in six months, a year, but not on the back end of my signing something like this,” he said, according to the report.

“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the de-facto Saudi ruler reportedly said. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.”

Israel’s commitment to advancing a Palestinian state is considered a key sticking point with the current right-wing Israeli government, which has repeatedly rejected the possibility of such a move, especially in the wake of the October 7 attack, saying that doing so would be tantamount to rewarding terrorism.

After the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war following the terror group’s deadly October 7 onslaught, Saudi Arabia largely put on ice US-backed plans for the kingdom to normalize ties with Israel, two sources familiar with Riyadh’s thinking said earlier this year.

But Saudi officials have continued to publicly and privately say since the start of the war that a normalization deal with Israel is still on its diplomatic agenda, while publicly pushing for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

MBS, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, said just weeks before the fighting broke out that Riyadh was getting closer to a deal, but talks were essentially frozen in the first months of the war.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a tent on January 8, 2024. (Saudi Press Agency)

‘He just stood there, punching buttons’

Another anecdote shared by the Atlantic appeared to describe the prime minister’s inability to operate a copy machine.

During his October 16 visit to Israel, Blinken worked to convince Netanyahu to open Gaza’s Rafah border crossing to allow badly needed humanitarian aid into the Strip. Until then, Israel had imposed a total closure on the Strip.

According to the report, Netanyahu and Blinken went to make a copy of the agreement they drafted at the Kirya Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu struggled to figure out how to operate the machine. “He just stood there, punching buttons,” the report said.