“We are on the brink. The precipice. At a few minutes to midnight.” These were the words of Foreign Secretary David Lammy last night at the UN Security Meeting, as the UK joined the US and ten other allies in calling for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The situation has escalated quickly since last week’s remarkable story of exploding Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies. Rocket fire between the two sides has intensified, with fears that Israel is preparing for a ground offensive in southern Lebanon, moving the situation one step closer to “all-out war” in the Middle East. That’s the phrase used by President Joe Biden last night.
It’s also the headline of this week’s New Statesman cover story by Lawrence Freedman, who writes that “Israel is pursuing a strategy often described as ‘escalate to de-escalate’, which means ramping up the pressure on Hezbollah in order to persuade it to look for a way out of the war and agree to a ceasefire.” Neither side wants the conflict to tip over into a full-blown regional war that could drag in Iran and potentially even the US. This is what has maintained an uneasy equilibrium over the past year, as Israel focused its resources on destroying Hamas, and Hezbollah confined its efforts to firing rockets over the border.
Now that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has announced it has completed its operations in Rafah in southern Gaza, the calculation is shifting. The IDF has set a new goal: returning to their homes the 60,000 Israelis who were evacuated from near the Lebanese border at the start of the war, to escape Hezbollah missiles. Freedman adds of Israel’s latest efforts: “This is essentially a coercive strategy, which has the standard problem that it is easier to ramp up pressure than it is to get the desired political results.”
This morning, Israel said it hit 75 Hezbollah targets overnight. Lebanon has put the total killed since the bombardment began at more than 600. According to the UN, 90,000 people have been newly displaced in Lebanon since Monday.
Where does this leave the UN’s call for a ceasefire? Today, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will speak to the General Assembly in New York, in response to last night’s vote. Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid, has said his country should accept the ceasefire proposal “but only for seven days”, while finance minister Bezalel Smotrich (one of the more extreme figures in Netanyahu’s government) has said the campaign should only end in “crushing Hezbollah and denying its ability to harm residents in the north”.
Keir Starmer will also make a speech at the UN General Assembly later today, where he will recommit Britain “to the UN, to internationalism, to the rule of law”. It’s a line very much in keeping with how the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary pledged to approach foreign policy long before the election. When they first started drafting those lines, they probably did not anticipate that they would be heading straight from the first party conference under a Labour government in 14 years to a UN meeting with the aim of averting all-out war. It all makes the row over freebies – glasses, Arsenal tickets, a spare apartment so Starmer’s son could study in peace for his GCSEs – look pretty insignificant by comparison.
[See also: The Netanyahu doctrine will fail in Lebanon]
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