Gaza War: Only the Harbinger of a Bigger War to Come-The inevitable war on the horizon

Frontpagemagazine ^ | March 19, 2024 | Hugh Fitzgerald

[SJackson]

Hezbollah, the terror group made up of Lebanese Shi’a, is a far more formidable fighting force than is Hamas. It has a vast armory of 160,000 rockets and missiles, many of them precision-guided, supplied by Iran, as compared to fewer than 10,000 much cruder rockets now possessed by Hamas after five months of war. Hamas had 30,000 troops on October 6, before the Gaza war began, and now has about 15,000 fighters still alive, with many of them having been wounded. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has at least 100,000 well-trained and well-armed troops, thanks to the backing, in weapons and money, that it receives from its indispensable ally, Iran. And it is Hezbollah’s constant bombing of the Galilee in northern Israel that has forced more than 96,000 Israelis in the north to be displaced, having had to move out of their homes near the northern border with Lebanon for their own safety, in light of constant Hezbollah bombardments. Most generals in the IDF, and the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, believe that war with Hezbollah is inevitable; the only question is whether it will start while the Gaza War is still on or will Israel, when that war with Hezbollah comes, be able to concentrate all its efforts on its enemy to the north. Even now, Israelis worried about Hezbollah damaging Israel’s electricity grid have been buying generators in anticipation of what will come.

More on Israel’s war with Hezbollah that becomes more likely every day can be found here:

The few enquiring minds still left occasionally ask me what the most underreported stories of the current Israel-Hamas conflict are. I tend to reply that there are two.

The first is the issue of Israeli refugees. They are not called that inside Israel, where the authorities prefer to refer to them as ‘internally displaced people’. But while the world rightly concerns itself with the internally displaced people inside Gaza, the lack of notice paid to this other story is strange.

There are 117,000 displaced Israelis in the south, where they have moved away from the border with Gaza, where Hamas still manages to send rockets hurtling toward Sderot and Ashdod and Ashkelon, while 96,000 have moved away from the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah regularly engages in tit-tor-tat exchanges of fire with the IDF. But these internally displaced Israelis are rarely mentioned in the foreign press which focuses solely on the “more than one million displaced civilians in Gaza.”

What we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish. The real showdown will be with Tehran….

The residents of the north are not so lucky. While Hamas may have been significantly degraded in Gaza (which you can also tell from the fact that what used to be daily sirens in Tel Aviv are now a monthly affair), Hezbollah’s arsenal of perhaps 160,000 rockets remains sitting on the Lebanon border. They are of a higher quality than Hamas’s rockets, longer range and far more deadly. If Hamas was Iran’s Ford Cortina, Hezbollah is its Lamborghini. And there is the question of when Iran wants to use them. It might use them any day, or it might be waiting until the regime in Tehran is on the brink of its long-sought-after nuclear bomb and can then use Hezbollah as a deterrent against any Israeli or American strike.

Which brings me to my second unreported fact. And I hope you’ve had your breakfast before digesting this.

I was on the Lebanon border 18 years ago, during the 2006 war with Israel. I well remember the shelling and the firing. Seeing the activity there in recent months (where it is much more heated than either side wants to admit) has persuaded me of something. The war in the Middle East has not yet begun. Or at least what we have seen in Gaza is merely an opening skirmish.

No country could cope with significant swaths of its population being permanently displaced from their homes. But what the world outside the region seems not to realise is that Gaza is a sideshow. The real showdown in the region will be with Tehran.

The war with Hezbollah will be many times more destructive and dangerous for Israel than the current war in Gaza, given Hezbollah’s huge arsenal of precision-guided missiles and the size of its fighting force, which as of now is about ten times what Hamas can count on, after its losses during the past five months of fighting.

[pierrem15]

You're not CINC, though are you? The American people are no longer in control of the government here.

The truth of the matter is that the overwhelming majority will shut up and do what they're told, or lose their bank accounts, their jobs or finally be arrested on trumped up charges. There's a lot of hot air about standing up to the current regime. But that's all there is.

If you had told me ten years ago that we could all watch an election be stolen in real time without serious consequences I would have thought you were crazy. But that's what they did and there have been zero consequences so far.