Fears of escalation after Israel retaliates with attacks on Lebanon

JERUSALEM – Western diplomats were scrambling Sunday to prevent a surge of fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border, officials said, after a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town. The rocket prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.

The initial Israeli response appeared to stop short of a major escalation, but there were still fears that the fallout from the rocket launch would lead to all-out war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, facing domestic pressure to mount a fiercer response, met with senior ministers and security officials Sunday to discuss further steps, after flying back early from a trip to the United States.

Israel blamed Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese group that has been attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas, for the deadly rocket attack Saturday on the Druse Arab town of Majdal Shams. Hezbollah has denied it was responsible.

Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said in a statement that Hezbollah had organized the attack. “It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control,” the statement said.

U.S. diplomats were in continuous contact with the Israeli and Lebanese governments Sunday to contain the hostilities, Watson’s statement said. The U.S. had asked Lebanon’s government to relay a message to Hezbollah to show restraint in the face of a further Israeli response, according to Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib.

“We are trying to restrain Hezbollah now from retaliating to whatever the Israelis do next,” Bou Habib said in a call with the New York Times. It was not immediately possible to confirm that with U.S. officials.

French officials also passed messages back and forth between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a Western official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. France still has some influence in Lebanon owing to its former status as a French protectorate after World War I.

The backchannel diplomacy came amid threats from both Israel and Iran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry warned Israel of “unforeseen consequences” of any Israeli escalation, while Israel’s education minister, Yoav Kisch, called for a strong response “even if it means entering into an all-out war.”

The Israeli military said its overnight strikes had chiefly targeted places in Lebanon that it had often hit in the past, mostly close to the border with Israel or surrounding the southern port of Tyre. It reported one strike in the Bekaa Valley, roughly 60 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border, where it has been striking less frequently since February. Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported extensive damage and some casualties resulting from the overnight Israeli strikes that began shortly after midnight and lasted until dawn. It was not immediately clear if the casualties were civilians or militants.

The rocket strike Saturday, which hit children and teenagers at a soccer field, was the deadliest assault on Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging missile and rocket fire in October.

Some Israelis want Netanyahu to authorize a full-scale ground invasion of southern Lebanon in order to deter similar attacks. But others fear that such a move would prompt a far more devastating response from Hezbollah, whose arsenal of weapons is considered larger and more sophisticated than almost any other nonstate actor in the region.

Israeli commanders are also wary of opening up a second major war while the war in the Gaza Strip is still raging. After nine months of fighting with Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel’s munitions stockpiles have dwindled, raising questions about how intense a battle it could fight in Lebanon.

For now, Israeli officials say that they are still open to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with Hezbollah. Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, said in a statement Sunday that a full-scale war could still be averted through the enforcement of a never-implemented United Nations resolution from 2006 that would create a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon.

Still, there were strong expectations Sunday that Israel might mount a bigger response. That, analysts fear, could tip the low-level hostilities between Israel and militias led by Hezbollah into more intense conflict.

Roughly 100,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 in Israel have been displaced, with scores of schools and health centers shuttered in both countries.

More than 460 people in Lebanon have been killed, most of them militants. More than 100 were civilians, including 12 children and 21 health workers, according to the United Nations and Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The fighting has killed 22 Israeli soldiers and 24 civilians, according to the Israeli government.

But unlike in Gaza, both sides have largely avoided attacks that cause overwhelming loss of life, which would in turn prompt their opponent to respond with overwhelming force.

The scale of the bloodshed Saturday night has provided one of the strongest tests to that calculus since October.

“Hezbollah will pay a heavy price, which it has not paid up to now,” Netanyahu’s office said in an overnight statement.

U.N. officials urged Israel and Hezbollah to “exercise maximum restraint,” warning that “it could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief,” according to a joint statement by the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, and the chief of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, Lt. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro.

The attack Saturday set off widespread grief in the Golan Heights, where thousands of Druse Arabs observed a day of mourning Sunday, shutting shops and other workplaces. Thousands went by bus to Majdal Shams to attend the funerals of those slain.

“The worst thing that has happened to the Druse in my memory,” said Diab Shams, 21, a Druse electrical engineering student who was traveling by bus to the town. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, with tears in his eyes.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

As the bus passed a Jewish Israeli town, scores of Jewish residents could be seen gathered beside the road waving both Israeli and Druse flags in a gesture of solidarity with the Druse community.

The Golan Heights is a territory once held by Syria that was captured by Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Israel annexed the territory in 1981, a move that was not recognized by most of the world. Decades later, President Donald Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty there, but most countries consider it occupied territory.

Roughly 20,000 Druse Arabs live in the Golan Heights, including in the town hit by the rocket; some still consider themselves Syrian, refusing Israeli passports, while a minority have taken Israeli citizenship. Jewish Israelis began settling the territory after 1967, and more than 20,000 now live in the area.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.