Sao Paulo
The ballet of notsosubtle signals from the actors surrounding the war between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas experienced important developments this Saturday (14).
The United States will increase its military presence with a second aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean to support Israel’s offensive in Gaza and try to dissuade Iran and its regional allies from intervening in the conflict. Tehran sent its foreign minister to discuss the crisis for the first time with leaders of Hamas and another terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad.
Finally, Syria accused Israel of attacking its airport in the northern city of Aleppo again.
The American announcement came early in the evening after ABC television announced that the USS Dwight Eisenhower and its strike group would leave the base in Norfolk, USA, towards the Israeli coast. It is a squadron with a cruiser, two destroyers, all capable of missile fire and interception missions, and support ships.
That’s a tremendous amount of firepower, especially when added to that of the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest warship, which has already arrived in the area with a similar escort.
However, the new group is expected to take more than three weeks to reach the Haifa area (northern Israel). The previous move was criticized by Russia and Turkey, which called it an escalation. President Vladimir Putin even questioned whether Washington wanted to “bomb Lebanon or what” with the presence of the nuclearpowered aircraft carrier.
In addition, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that the Air Force has deployed F15 fighter squadrons specializing in longrange strikes, F16s and A10s, a model used to attack troops and tanks.
All of this signals massive support for Israel if things get out of hand, as in the almost daily battles with Hezbollah, a Tehranbacked Lebanese militia allied with Hamas.
The Iranians, on the other hand, invested in political gestures. Hamas said on Saturday that its political leader Ismail Hanyeh met with Iranian Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian in Qatar. It was the first public meeting between a senior official in the country involved in financing the terrorist group that attacked Israel and one of its leaders.
Abdollahian had previously met in Beirut with the secretary general of another organization fighting the Jewish state, Islamic Jihad. Iran calls the meeting of entities that reject the existence of Israel and the growing agreements between the Jewish state and Arab countries in the region, such as the Emirates, the “Axis of Resistance.”
What they all have in common is a connection to Putin’s Russia, the US’s opponent in the Ukraine war and in the larger conflict that the Kremlin is defending with the West. The group also includes Syria, which returned to the news this Saturday with a shootout with Israel in the Golan Heights region, the Syrian territories occupied by Tel Aviv since 1967.
Two days after an attack attributed to Israel on Damascus and Aleppo airports, the main airport in the north of the country, Damascus again accused Tel Aviv of targeting the second airfield. The Israeli Defense Forces did not comment on the case, once again highlighting the risks of a regional escalation of the crisis.
The central hypothesis in the likely hypothesis that the attack was Israeli is a warning about Syrian involvement in the conflict the airports are entry points for weapons from Iran, an ally of all Israeli adversaries in the region, which can be targeted by Hezbollah for example.