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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Perhaps they want Hezbollah weakened?

    https://www.csis.org/analysis/israel-hezbollah-escalation

    The U.S. government is deeply sympathetic to Israeli efforts to weaken Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a foreign terrorist organization, and the U.S. government doesn’t talk to Hezbollah. As mentioned previously, Hezbollah is a militia that operates with impunity from the rules of the state of Lebanon. From the perspective of the U.S. government, diminishing Hezbollah’s capabilities is not a bad thing. Rather, the United States’ challenge is ensuring that this escalation does not tip the entire region into war. The region is a tinderbox. There are already issues of increasing violence in the West Bank, there’s a war in Gaza, and Iran is certainly involved in many regional activities, including Houthi threats to navigation in the Red Sea.

    While the Biden administration is concerned that things could get out of control, there is also a broader context. When Israel has taken military action in the past, the U.S. government has often waited a couple of weeks before trying to roll things back. This week, the president is preoccupied with his address to the UN General Assembly. There’s a sense that Israel is still doing necessary—and perhaps from the view of some members of the U.S. government—useful work by knocking Hezbollah back. If the escalation stays within manageable parameters, the United States will likely try to apply pressure on Israel in the next week. From an Israeli perspective, they can act with relative impunity this week. After the pager attack, Hezbollah doesn’t trust its communication systems and doesn’t seem to be pressing toward war. From an Israeli perspective, Iran doesn’t seem to be pressing toward war either, which makes it less risky for Israel to act strongly against Hezbollah. Looking toward the weekend, there will likely be a continued escalation in Israeli actions, although it is unlikely that the situation will tip into an all-out war before then.






  • Source for those interested (it is also sourced in the article to another axios article):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Iranian_strikes_against_Israel

    On 13 April 2024, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, in collaboration with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and the Ansar Allah (Houthis), launched retaliatory attacks against Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights with loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. The attack was codenamed by Iran as Operation True Promise (Persian: وعده صادق, romanized: va’de-ye sādeq). Iran said it was retaliation for the Israeli bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus on 1 April, which killed two Iranian generals. The strike was seen as a spillover of the Israel–Hamas war and marked Iran’s first direct attack on Israel since the start of their proxy conflict.

    The attack was the largest attempted drone strike in history, intended to overwhelm anti-aircraft defenses. It was the first time since Iraq’s 1991 missile strikes that Israel was directly attacked by the military of another state. Iran’s attacks drew criticism from the United Nations, several world leaders, and political analysts, who warned that they risk escalating into a full-blown regional war. Israel retaliated by executing limited strikes on Iran on 18 April 2024.