Juan Cole
Informed Comment / September 22, 2024
Ann Arbor – Al-Jazeera reports that Hezbollah escalated its rocket attacks on northern Israel and Syria’s Golan Heights occupied by Israel. Some of these rockets targeted the Ramat David Air Base near Haifa. The Israeli military said that most of the Hezbollah rockets were intercepted.
The barrages went on Saturday and began again this (Sunday) morning, striking east and south of Gaza and the Golan Heights, as well as in the Galilee. Some rocket debris landed in east Haifa and cut off the electricity for some districts. It was the deepest Hezbollah had struck into Israel since the total war on Gaza began on October 8, and this depth of strike is unusual for the Lebanese Shiite militia.
[Juan says: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely believed to be seeking an widening of the Gaza war to Lebanon as a way of rallying the Israeli public and staying in power to avoid possible jail time as a result of the two civil corruption cases against him, which are paused in the courts as long as he is PM. The Biden administration had pressured Netanyahu not to go this route, but he stopped paying attention to Biden’s red lines a long time ago. In the first 6 months after October 7, some 80% of the cross-border Israel-Lebanon attacks were launched by Israel, and 20% by Hezbollah.]Some 80,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the north by Hezbollah rockets in the past year. About 95,000 Lebanese in south Lebanon have also been forced out of the areas near their border with Israel by Israeli air strikes.
Back to Al-Jazeera: Hezbollah late on Saturday said that the base and airfield at Ramat David was hit a second time by dozens of heavy long range Fadi 1 and Fadi 2 rocket shells. F-16s fly to bomb targets in Lebanon from this base. In actuality, the rockets appear to have been intercepted or to have fallen on open fields, though the Israelis admitted one fell near the base.
Five barrages of 30 rockets each were fired at Galilee and East Haifa by Hezbollah. On Sunday morning some 30 rockets landed on northern Israel alone.
It was announced that Haifa schools and schools of towns in its vicinity — including Akka — would close on Sunday. The metro area population of Haifa is about 1.1 million, and it is 20% Muslim.
The Israeli press reported that there was one Israeli casualty in the lower Galilee from the Hezbollah bombardment.
Israeli radio reported that the residents of Kiryat Tiv’on near Haifa had tried to take refuge in their local shelter but found it locked.
Israeli anti-missile missiles appear to have started a fire that firemen rushed to contain. Likewise one of the Hezbollah rockets started a fire at Marj Bin Amer in the north.
Al-Jazeera quotes Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that Hezbollah was focusing on military targets and not civilians in cities, suggesting that it “does not want to break the rules.” It said that it is unclear if this was a limited raid or just the beginning.
The Israeli Air Force replied with strikes on southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah had vowed revenge on Israel for the booby trapped pagers that injured and blinded some 3000 persons, many of them Hezbollah members, though some of them were civilian Party members rather than guerrillas. One physician said he had never removed so many eyes in his life. Such booby trap attacks are forbidden by the second Protocol to the Conventional Weapons Treaty, to which Israel is a high signatory. Israel also took out a building in east Beirut, killing a high Hezbollah official, Ibrahim Aqil, who is implicated in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut.
The Israelis claim to have decimated the Hezbollah leadership, but they have never understood how clan-based organizations work; siblings and cousins step up to replace killed commanders.
The State Department asked all Americans to leave Lebanon while there were still commercial flights, since these might be cancelled if hostilities escalate.
Al-Jazeera reports that State Department sources are afraid the current round of tit-for-tat exchanges of fire could easily escalate into a full-scale war.
In other news on Saturday, Israeli jets bombed a UN school / shelter in Gaza, killing 22 persons, including a pregnant woman — in what has become a daily war crime.
Video added by Informed Comment :
CBS Evening News: “Israel, Hezbollah exchange border fire one day after Beirut attack”
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
