Calarm grew Monday over the prospects of a third Lebanon war that could spill over to include Iran, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the Islamic Republic was the force behind the country’s multi-front existential wars.
“We are in a fight for our existence, a fight being conducted on seven fronts. The attack against us is being led by Iran, which openly seeks to destroy us,” Netanyahu told the Knesset plenum on Monday.
“Iran and its proxies have been scheming to do this through missile attacks against Israel and by invading our territory. The more we deepen the war in the Gaza Strip, the more we discover additional evidence of the scope of the multi-front campaign against us,” Netanyahu said.
“We will thwart this campaign,” he stressed.
National Unity Party head MK Benny Gantz, who is a former defense minister and IDF chief of staff, told French President Emmanuel Macron in a phone conversation that the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the cross-border violence seemed more remote, and war more likely.
“Resorting to military means to remove the threat Hezbollah poses to the citizens of Northern Israel as part of the wider Shi’ite-Iranian axis of terror destabilizing the region, seems increasingly necessary,” Gantz told Macron, according to his spokesperson.
US and Israeli officials urge diplomatic solutions
Gantz stressed the importance of consolidating a new regional architecture based on an alliance of moderates to counter growing Iranian aggression, his spokesperson explained.
US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller cautioned Israel that “we will continue to press the government of Israel that we don’t want to see further escalation.”
He spoke with reporters as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington. The two met after Gallant spoke face-to-face with US envoy Amos Hochstein, who visited Israel and Lebanon last week.
“We don’t want to see a full-scale war with Hezbollah. We think there ought to be a diplomatic resolution to the conflict across the Israel-Lebanon border that is keeping tens of thousands of families on each side of the border from returning to their homes,” Miller said.
US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the 21st Herzliya Conference at the Reichman University on Monday that the US was “urging a diplomatic solution,” and that Hochstein had been traveling back and forth between Lebanon and Israel to try and achieve that goal.
“A diplomatic outcome… is, I think, closer than people think in terms of most of the issues,” Lew said. “We just are not at a point in time where there’s the kind of quiet in Gaza to permit that to get to a completion.”
Lew in Herzliya and Miller in Washington both stressed the importance of a Gaza ceasefire to the restoration of calm along Israel’s northern border.
US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the Military, General C.Q. Brown, warned on Sunday that it was unlikely that America could provide the kind of security umbrella to Israel in the event of a war with Hezbollah, as it did when Iran attacked in April. His words carried added weight in light of concerns that Hezbollah missiles could overwhelm the Iron Dome system in the North.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who visited Israel on Monday en-route to Beirut, spoke of the growing tensions in the North when she addressed the Herzliya Conference.
“The risk of an unintended escalation and of all-out war is growing by the day,” she stated.
“We are extremely concerned about the increase in violence at the northern border,” Baerbock said. “I will pay a visit to Beirut tomorrow again exactly for this reason, where many also do not want another war. Together with our partners, we are working hard on finding solutions that can prevent more suffering,” she said.
“Israel has a right to defend itself against Hezbollah’s relentless attacks in the North,” she stressed. “It’s Hezbollah who started this violence” after the Hamas-led attack against Israel on October 7, “forcing tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. No country in the world should have to accept that.”
The German Foreign Minister called on Hezbollah to withdraw the 2006 ceasefire line from the Second Lebanon war, as she called for the full implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1701 that codified that ceasefire.Earlier in the day, Baerbock participated in a meeting of European Union foreign ministers led by EU policy chief Josep Borrell.
He warned that the Middle East was close to seeing the conflict expanding into Lebanon, just days after Hezbollah threatened EU member Cyprus.
“The risk of this war affecting the south of Lebanon and spilling over is every day bigger,” Borrell told reporters ahead of a foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
“We are on the eve of the war expanding,” he said.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last week said that nowhere in Israel would be safe if a full-fledged war breaks out between the two foes, and also threatened EU member Cyprus for the first time and other parts of the Mediterranean.
“It is absolutely unacceptable to make threats against a sovereign state of the European Union,” Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis said. “We stand by Cyprus and we will all be together in all kinds of global threats coming from terrorist organizations.”
Reuters contributed to this report.