NEW YORK TIMES The President Joe Biden and his top advisers have urged Israeli leaders not to launch attacks against the United States Hezbollahthe powerful militia in Lebanon that can drag him into war IsraelHamassay American and Israeli officials.
U.S. officials fear that some of the most aggressive members of Israel’s war cabinet want to confront Hezbollah even as Israel begins a long conflict with Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks. The Americans are expressing to the Israelis how difficult it is to combat both the Hamas terror group in the south and the much more powerful Hezbollah force in the north.
U.S. officials believe Israel would be fighting a twofront war and that such a conflict could attract both fronts US How willthe militia’s main supporter.
Efforts by senior American officials to thwart an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah, reported in detail here for the first time, reveal the concerns of the Biden administration and its advisers about the prime minister’s war planning Benjamin Netanyahueven if the two governments have difficulty presenting a strong united front to the public.
The American authorities also want to control Hezbollah. At several meetings in the Middle East, American diplomats asked their Arab counterparts to help convey messages to the militias, including through their contacts in Iran, to try to prevent the start of a war between Israel and Hezbollah, either through Actions of the militia group or the Israelis.
American officials feared that Netanyahu would authorize a preemptive strike against Hezbollah after the October 7 Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,400 people. While those fears have subsided for now because Netanyahu has not entertained the idea, fears remain about two possibilities: an Israeli overreaction to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks and heavyhanded Israeli tactics in an expected Hezbollah ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza War would force them to invade.
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American officials advised their Israeli counterparts at this week’s meetings to be careful lest their actions in the north against Hezbollah and in the south in Gaza give Hezbollah an easy excuse to enter the war. These delicate conversations took place during Biden’s visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday25, and during the Secretary of State’s long negotiations Antony J. Blinken in Israel earlier this week.
President Joe Biden visited Israel this week Photo: Portal/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
On both visits, American officials met with Netanyahu and his war cabinet, something almost unprecedented in Israel’s history. They avoided using blunt language to warn Israelis against provocative military actions because they understood the vulnerability that Israeli authorities felt after the October 7 attacks. But both Biden and Blinken have made their concerns clear, said American and Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity so they could speak candidly about wartime diplomatic discussions.
Gallant told Blinken in a small meeting on Monday that he had advocated for a preemptive strike against Hezbollah the previous week but had been overruled by other officials, a person familiar with the discussion said.
Biden met Wednesday with the Israeli War Cabinet, where Gallant was present, and underscored the dangers of a twofront war by asking tough questions about the many consequences for Israel of a fullscale conflict with Hezbollah, authorities said. Biden also raised the specter of disastrous decisions by American authorities to invade the country Iraq and to fight a long and endless war Afghanistan.
The White House National Security Council and the State Department declined to comment for this story. The Israeli military and Gallant also declined to comment.
A representative from Netanyahu’s office issued a statement saying: “Israel is united in the war against Hamas.” Prime Minister Netanyahu said that if Hezbollah joins the war, it will make a grave mistake and a devastating cost like never before pay beforehand.”
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Lesson from September 11th
From October 12 to 18, during the week of Blinken’s marathon travel due to the Middle East crisis and Biden’s visit to Tel Aviv, the Biden administration evolved the way it communicated its concerns to Israel and ultimately decided to address them through lessons to convey America’s costly overreaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
At an Oct. 12 press conference in Tel Aviv, Blinken avoided directly answering an American reporter’s question about whether he could draw any lessons for Israel from its response to 9/11. But on Oct. 18, he and Biden spoke about the U.S.’s mistakes, particularly toward Israelis, and Biden openly pointed out those mistakes in a speech in Tel Aviv.
For now, Netanyahu has refrained from supporting a major attack on Hezbollah, despite encouragement from Gallant and senior military generals, U.S. and Israeli officials said. And the Israeli military has not yet responded with overwhelming force to Hezbollah’s sustained lowaltitude rocket fire. But the accelerated events of war can change that.
American and Israeli officials say they have found no evidence so far that Hezbollah or Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attacks. Several senior Hezbollah and Iranian officials appeared to have been caught off guard by the attacks, American and Israeli officials said. American and allied officials also said they had assumed for years that Hezbollah leaders had sought to avoid an allout war with Israel.
A United States CIA (CIA) has long believed that Israel would face major challenges in a war against Hezbollah and Hamas, officials familiar with the intelligence agency say. Recent work includes analyzing that deep divisions in Israel over Netanyahu’s proposed changes to the judiciary have weakened the Israeli military, officials said.
White House officials began to worry about the prospect of a larger war when they heard of a debate among Israeli officials shortly after the Hamas attacks on October 7 about a preemptive attack on Hezbollah and concentrating the country’s main fighting effort experienced this group. White House officials told the Israelis that this was a bad idea.
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In the internal Israeli debate, Netanyahu expressed some support for the attack, Israeli officials said. Some Israeli military officials developed a plan focused on attacking Hezbollah, using the pretext of an invasion of Gaza as a cover for a larger attack in the north, they said. Netanyahu delayed implementation of the plan, to the disappointment of Gallant, a former Marine special forces commander, and other supporters of the plan, officials said.
When Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv on October 12 for his first wartime visit, American officials were less worried about that attack but still worried about a possible Israeli overreaction to Hezbollah’s ongoing rocket attacks.
O Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel However, the group has so far managed to avoid a major attack since the start of Israel’s war against Hamas, which resulted in Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire in southern Lebanon. Since the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, the group has become stronger and better armed, according to Israeli officials, and has around 100,000 rockets and missiles in its arsenal. Hezbollah also has many fighters who have honed their skills fighting the Islamic State in Syria.
Since the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, the group has become stronger and better armed. Photo: Jalaa MAREY / AFP
In parallel, the Biden administration is conducting a diplomatic and military deterrence campaign to prevent Hezbollah from going to war against Israel. If that happens, Iran could decide to get involved in the fight, turning the conflict regional, although U.S. officials believe Iran may not want to enter such a war for now.
Blinken and his colleagues have relayed messages to Iran and Hezbollah through Qatar, China and other nations to tell Israel’s opponents to stay out of the Hamas war. As a deterrent, the Pentagon has sent two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean and increased troops in the region.
The debate among Israeli officials over whether to attack Hezbollah is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s efforts to invade Iraq after the Sept. 11 attacks, even as it was still fighting a war in Afghanistan, where alQaeda, the terrorist group that carried out these attacks.
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Biden said three notable sentences in his speech in Tel Aviv that referred to the “mistakes” of the United States after the September 11 attacks.
“I advise you: While you feel that anger, don’t let it consume you,” Biden said. “After 9/11, we were angry in the United States. And while we have sought and achieved justice, we have also made mistakes.”
Shortly before Biden’s visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, third State Department official Victoria Nuland and other senior diplomats told a small group of U.S. lawmakers that the Biden administration was concerned about the possibility that Israel could escalate the war with a major attack about Hezbollah and other armed groups, an official with knowledge of the meeting said. The diplomats said they were concerned that some Israeli officials, including Netanyahu and Gallant, were blinded by anger over atrocities committed by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attack, the official said.
Diplomats told lawmakers that this was one of the reasons Blinken’s meeting with Netanyahu and Israel’s War Cabinet, which began Monday evening, dragged on for seven and a half hours until Tuesday morning.
After the October 7 attacks, Gallant announced a “full siege of Gaza” and announced cuts to water, electricity and food, going well beyond the naval blockade imposed 16 years ago. “We are fighting human animals,” he said. Israel’s bombing campaign following Hamas attacks resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and the displacement of more than a million people. Israel ordered all residents of the northern Gaza Strip to move south ahead of an expected ground invasion. But since then, Israel has been bombing the areas of Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
After Gallant and Blinken’s meeting on Monday, the two were expected to pose silently on a stage to take photos for journalists. But Gallant surprised American diplomats with public comments in which he praised the presence of U.S. warships in the Mediterranean — which could turn into an allout conflict between Israel and Hezbollah — and said: “This is going to be a long war; The price will be high.” / TRANSLATION LÍVIA BUELONI GONÇALVES
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