UN Security Council Holds Emergency Meeting on Israel-Hezbollah Escalation

Source; CFR

The UN Security Council will discuss a week of the most intense hostilities in Lebanon and northern Israel in almost a year of war; they have included a barrage of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, rocket attacks, air strikes, and pledges of continued military action both by Israel and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Yesterday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged a “severe reckoning” for attacks on electronic devices earlier in the week, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel had entered a “new phase of the war” on its northern border. Israel said that it struck around one hundred rocket launch sites set to be fired at Israel from southern Lebanon last night and today, as Hezbollah sent off at least 140 rockets into northern Israel.?

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Countries including the United States, France, and the United Kingdom have called for restraint; the White House said a diplomatic solution was achievable and urgent. Meanwhile, investigators in multiple countries are still trying to track how explosions occurred in electronic devices shipped to Lebanon; the incident has raised new concerns about the safety of global electronics supply chains. (Reuters, NYT, WaPo)

Analysis

“Hezbollah...knows that a full-scale war with Israel would imperil its future and its regional status, as evidenced in its restrained response to Israel’s recent provocations. A conflict of those dimensions could also further damage Hezbollah’s domestic standing because Lebanon would be hard-pressed to rebuild afterward,” Carnegie’s Mohanad Hage Ali writes for Foreign Affairs.?

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“The reality is that hundreds of thousands of civilians—in Lebanon and Israel—are on the brink of a devastating escalation of this conflict if the hardliners get their way. Many are already displaced, injured and killed. They must be [the international community’s] central concern,” University of Oxford’s Tom Fletcher writes in the Financial Times.?

Read the full suite of Foreign Affairs and CFR.org resources on Israel and the current conflict.