26.09.2024
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Third war begins
Despite supposedly working ‘tirelessly’ for peace, the US is doing nothing to hold Israel back. Yassamine Mather warns that the war on Lebanon could conceivably see Iran dragged into the conflict
I start by condemning last week’s terrorist act of mass mutilation by the state of Israel. Far from being a clever, audacious cyber hacking, this was a crude method of assassinating and injuring by planting explosives in pagers that had been sold to Hezbollah by a company associated with the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. These are old-style pagers, bought by Hezbollah following warnings by secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah that mobile phones presented a risk, as they could be hacked.
This was a mass-scale version of the mafia-style car bombings previously seen in Italy, Russia and elsewhere. Had any other country engaged in such a crude form of violence - against victims that included women, children and the elderly - we would have heard no end to US and western condemnation of ‘terrorism’. Any other country would have faced sanctions and even military threats. Yet the only statement on the slaughter so far by the world hegemon and its allies have been calling for Lebanon and Iran to show “restraint”. All this makes a mockery of western claims about defending human rights, etc.
In February 2024 Nasrallah had warned members of his organisation to avoid using mobile phones, stating that Israel tracks people through their phones, monitoring their locations, conversations, data, images and even their families, regardless of whether they are at home, at work or in their vehicles. He claimed Israel can even detect which seat a person occupies in a car. Addressing “brothers” in southern Lebanon, he urged them to stop using mobile phones, which he described as “deadly collaborators”, and advised disabling or burying them for extended periods to safeguard security, lives and dignity. He claimed that, during wartime, Islamic law forbids the use of mobile phones, as it puts lives at risk.
Instead, the organisation bought thousands of old-style pagers, according to Wall Street Journal reporters. The initial indications were that a company called Gold Apollo in Taiwan made the devices. However, the company distanced itself from this particular killer batch, adding that a Hungarian company called BAC Consulting had purchased the devices.
BAC Consulting had been registered in 2022 in Hungary to carry out dozens of business activities, ranging from selling telecommunications devices to producing computer games. But, according to the Hungarian media outlet, Telex.hu, a Bulgarian company known as Norta Global Ltd sold the pagers to Hezbollah. As Bulgarian authorities looked into its activities, it appeared that Norta had been registered in Sofia by a Norwegian citizen. Norwegian police then got involved, but Rinson Jose, the entrepreneur who registered the company, has since gone missing. Spinning this web of virtual companies and entrepreneurs only plays one role: hiding the obvious culprit, Mossad.
Another hypothesis suggests that the timing of the attacks could be due to the rigged devices’ imminent risk of discovery. According to several reports, Israeli intelligence services originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah. They chose to act early, however, when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors. According to the website Al-Monitor, days earlier, another Hezbollah member had been killed after he raised suspicions that the devices had been tampered with.
Israeli aims
The declared aims of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and war in the entire region keep changing, but the latest version includes the following:
1. The complete destruction of Hamas in Gaza, including “uprooting the Hamas regime” and “destroying Hamas’s military and governing infrastructure”.1
2. The release of all hostages held by Hamas.
3. Ensuring long-term security for Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
4. The return of northern residents, who were evacuated due to attacks by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is a more recent addition to previously existing aims and the Israeli prime minister’s office confirmed that this decision was approved during an overnight meeting of the security cabinet on September 16.
Irrespective of why last week was chosen as a suitable time for detonating these devices, there is no doubt that, in the words of B Michael, writing in the Haaretz opinion column:
Israel is bringing its state terrorism from Gaza and the West Bank to Lebanon ... who came up with the dreadful idea of planting explosives in devices that would maim the bodies of the victims? It’s premeditated. Was the goal to gouge out eyes, castrate people, dismember intestines or sever a hand?2
The Biden administration has so far supported Israeli war efforts, including genocide in Gaza, supplying it with bombs, missiles, fighter planes, etc. The one red line presented by the US is the expansion of the conflict into an all-out war with Lebanon. Faced with this, the Zionist state is making unbelievable propaganda, claiming that 60,000 Israelis have been displaced over the last year. This refers to people who lived within 3.5 kilometres of the border with Lebanon and, according to the same source, “30 communities have been displaced since October 7 2023” as a result of attacks by Hezbollah. The current claim by the Zionist state is that the fourth aim of the war is as important as the other three and that is why it is attacking Lebanon.
Of course, there is a lot of doubt about this claim, partly because everyone knows that this type of attack - a bit like the killing of Hamas chair Ismail Haniyeh on a visit to Tehran - is to get Hezbollah fully involved, start a full-scale war in Lebanon and then get Iran involved too.
But, despite all this, Hezbollah has shown restraint and Iran, fearful of US retaliations is reluctant to do anything. Nasrallah admitted on September 20 that the pager attack had been a severe blow to his organisation. However, he was emphatic on one issue: “We will not turn this into a regional war.” Yet none of this matters, as Israel is determined to start exactly that. Surely we have witnessed the beginning of the third Lebanon war. Israel’s chief-of-staff, major general Herzi Halevi, has already announced the mobilisation of two brigades of reserve troops in preparation for crossing the border. So far more than 550 Lebanese people have been killed as a direct result of Israeli attack - not just in Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Lebanon, but in the north of the country too. The death toll is bound to rise to the many thousands.
Across southern Lebanon, families have been forced to hurriedly gather their belongings and flee north, as the Israeli military launched strikes on targets it claimed were associated with Hezbollah. According to some reports, tens of thousands of residents received warnings from the Israeli military, delivered via text messages and voice recordings in Arabic, urging them to evacuate areas near “Hezbollah positions”. Anyone with any knowledge of south Lebanon will know that the entire region can be considered Hezbollah territory. Whether we like it or not, Hezbollah provides health services, controls schools, mosques and even food distribution. So, just like in Gaza, the population of the southern region has no alternative - leave or die. Roads leading to Beirut and other major cities are still clogged with traffic. However, while 150 schools have become temporary shelters for refugees in the capital, Beirut itself is hardly safe.
There is an even more sinister reason why Israel has chosen to bombard this part of Lebanon. They claim that this would pave the way for the return of 60,000 citizens displaced from northern Israel, but, even if Israel succeeds in defeating Hezbollah in this initial stage of the conflict, it is unlikely that the displaced citizens of northern Israel will feel confident enough to return to their homes in areas so close to the Lebanese border. Even if Hezbollah is weakened, there will be a plentiful supply of volunteers seeking revenge against Israelis. As with other Zionist claims, the idea that war will allow a return of displaced Israeli citizens is a lie.
Israel’s borders
So we have to consider alternative reasons and paving the way for a military attack on Iran could be one of them. The Zionist state believes that now is the time to neutralise all immediate threats to its border, as a preliminary to long-sought strikes on Iran not least because of its nuclear programme. Tehran has been relying to a certain extent on Hezbollah to act as a deterrent, when it came to Israeli ambitions to destroy its nuclear facilities.
Other Hezbollah commanders who have been victims of recent assassinations include Ibrahim Aqil, who was killed in an IDF airstrike on Beirut on September 20. Aqil has been close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the US state department had accused him of involvement in Hezbollah’s 1984 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, and the attack on the US Marine Corps barracks seven months later, which killed 241 US personnel. In 2013, Washington offered a $7 million reward for any information that could lead to his location, arrest or conviction.
Forward to the present, on September 23 the Israeli airforce also hit a building in a Beirut suburb in an attempt to assassinate Ali Karaki, who was commander of Hezbollah’s southern front and near the top of Hezbollah’s chain of command. But Hezbollah released a subsequent statement saying that Karaki was still alive and doing “fine”.
According to Jeremy Bowen of the BBC, “Hezbollah is far more powerful, by multiple factors, than Hamas: far better armed; far better trained. They fought for years in Syria for president Assad, so they have plenty of experience.”
However, he is right to point out that all this is a gamble for Israel. The group has, up to this point, avoided deploying its more powerful and long-range weapons - with the sole exception of the launch of a Qader 1 ballistic missile on September 25 in the attempt to hit Mossad’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. This studied restraint falls far short of the “open-ended battle of reckoning” that Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, warned about on September 19. This raises the question: is Hezbollah reluctant to go too far, or simply incapable of unleashing its full arsenal?
Israel’s goal in what it calls ‘Operation Northern Arrow’ in Lebanon is clear. Hezbollah’s strategy remains unclear, but it is fundamentally rooted in resistance and survival. Widely regarded as the most powerful non-state military force in the world, Hezbollah is currently struggling after a series of significant setbacks.
No doubt its communications networks have been disrupted, while, of course, several high-ranking commanders have been killed, and its missile stockpile has been diminished by Israeli airstrikes. But, while the group has an array of powerful weapons, its response to Israeli provocations has so far been extraordinarily limited.
In fact, Iran has been urging Hezbollah to hold back, as it relies on the group’s arsenal to serve as a deterrent against potential Israeli strikes on its nuclear facilities. In addition, Hezbollah’s leadership is well aware that if its attacks on Israel result in significant civilian casualties, Israel would likely retaliate by targeting critical infrastructure, such as Beirut’s airport.
Another victim of Israeli-inflicted mass mutilation was the Iranian ambassador to Beirut. He was originally reported to have sustained only minor injuries, but it later appeared that things were much more serious and he was flown to Tehran.
Iran has claimed it sent a large number of doctors to Lebanon to help with hospitalised victims of the pager attack. Ironically, during the 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests in Iran the security forces used baton rounds and, according to some reports, the kind of eye injuries they caused were not dissimilar to those in Lebanon.
The pro-government Iranian press is using this as propaganda: we are helping the injured in Beirut, and so on - and, of course, in return, the rightwing opposition, especially the royalists, are saying, ‘You never helped the people who were injured in Iran.’ That is not quite true either: those who were injured by baton rounds were taken to hospital and treated, irrespective of the state’s opposition to the protestors.
Israel and Iran
Leaving that aside, so far Iran’s response to Israeli aggression remains mainly verbal. Of course, the level of attacks on Lebanon in the last few days might change all this. Last week the foreign ministry responded to reporters’ questions about the injuries inflicted on the Iranian ambassador in Beirut, saying that the issue was a Lebanese problem and they expect Beirut to deal with the attack!
Masoud Pezeshkian, the new Iranian president, on his arrival in New York for the annual assembly of the United Nations, was very clear: “Lebanon strikes are an Israeli ‘trap’ to draw us into war - they are dragging us to a point where we do not wish to go. There is no winner in warfare. We are only fooling ourselves if we believe that.”
On the assassination of Haniyeh, he told reporters what we already knew. Soon after this incident, the US went out of its way to convince Iran not to retaliate. According to Pezeshkian, “We tried to not respond. They kept telling us we are within reach of peace, perhaps in a week or so,” he said. “But we never reached that elusive peace. Every day, Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people - old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities.”
Of course, we all know that talk about the coming peace was based on another lie by the US and its allies. The Zionist state had no intention of signing a deal and the US state department must have been well aware of the distance between the two sides, making peace impossible. I find it unlikely that the Iranian government believed this nonsense. However, as I have written before, Iran’s Islamic Republic is conscious of its weakness and is unlikely to put its survival in danger by providing an excuse for an Israeli/US attack on its military, infrastructure and nuclear facilities.
Further remarks made by Masoud Pezeshkian regarding Iran’s willingness to ease tensions with Israel have sparked significant controversy. Both the foreign minister and the head of the Government Information Council reiterated that these statements are “completely false”.
Pezeshkian’s comments, made during a meeting with senior US media executives, generated widespread reactions both domestically and internationally. An audio recording was released in which he is heard saying: “Iran is ready to lay down its weapons if Israel does the same.” On the current conflict, he said: “A terrorist is a terrorist, whether Arab, non-Ajam, Persian, Israeli, or American. If they assassinate, they are terrorists.”
A few hours later, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who is accompanying Pezeshkian on his New York trip, “strongly denied” reports in certain media that Iran is prepared to reduce tensions with the Israeli regime. Meanwhile, the Government Information Council wrote:
Regarding the false attribution of comments about the Zionist regime, it is clarified that such statements were never made by the esteemed president of the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, during his meeting with American media managers, Dr Pezeshkian firmly condemned the Zionist regime’s crimes in Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon, emphasising that these acts violate humanitarian and international standards and must be stopped.
The Government Information Council also wrote that Pezeshkian explicitly stated: “The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran will not go unanswered, and this response will be delivered at the appropriate time.”
All this will make life difficult inside Iran: as always, a president who is trying very hard to be ‘a reformist diplomat’ will face many enemies within Iran’s borders.
In the week when the US tried to convince China to intervene and ask Iran to use its influence on the Houthis to stop attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, Pezeshkian’s reply to reporters was very clear: “We do not influence the Houthis.”
Israeli gamble
Over the last few decades in preparation for war with Iran, the Israeli media have done their best to portray a very sinister image of Iran and its population.
However, Ori Goldberg, an Israeli expert on Iran, has long challenged the prevailing perceptions of Iran and its geopolitical behaviour, particularly in Israel. Israeli discourse often frames Iran as a dangerous, extremist enemy, set on Israel’s destruction. But Goldberg - no fan of the Islamic Republic - argues that this is a simplistic and inaccurate portrayal.
According to Goldberg, who was quoted on the website of 972 Magazine, Iran’s policies are driven by “pragmatic nationalism” rather than religious fanaticism. Iran does not have a grand plan for Israel’s destruction, despite some leaders’ inflammatory rhetoric. Instead, Iran’s focus is on securing its national interests by building influence in the region, such as in Lebanon and Iraq, to safeguard its security. Iran’s regional behaviour, while confrontational, is seen as defensive and aimed at maintaining the regime’s stability rather than pursuing outright dominance or the annihilation of Israel.
Goldberg has been marginalised in the Israeli media, especially after criticising Zionist policies in Gaza, which he called “genocidal”. Despite this, his views have gained international attention, particularly for challenging the common narrative that Iran is entirely dedicated to Israel’s destruction. He points out that Israel’s tactical, isolationist approach contrasts with Iran’s strategy of regional engagement. Moreover, he criticises the Israeli assumption that Iran orchestrates all anti-Israel resistance, including Palestinian violence, calling this narrative a deliberate tactic to obscure the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Goldberg emphasises that Iran’s support for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is not rooted in ideological commitment to Palestinian liberation, but is a means to expand Iranian influence and destabilise its enemies. If a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians were reached, Goldberg argues, Iran would likely not oppose it, as its priority is regional power rather than the Palestinian cause.
Meanwhile, IDF commanders were jubilant about the successes of this week’s bombings. According to defence minister Yoav Gallant, “Today was a masterpiece … This was the worst week Hezbollah has had since its establishment, and the results speak for themselves.” However, as BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen reminds us, “Israel’s earlier wars with Hezbollah were grinding, attritional and never produced a decisive victory for either side.”
The decision to launch a ground offensive into south Lebanon will present many dangers, and in Israel many are reminding the Netanyahu government that, after almost a year of relentless war, Hamas is far from being defeated in Gaza. IDF forces have not even been able to destroy all the tunnels Hamas dug through the rocks under Gaza. As for Hezbollah, it is a far more powerful force, with up to 200,000 missiles and rockets at its disposal. A US think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, estimates that Hezbollah has around 30,000 active fighters and up to 20,000 reserves - many veterans of the Syrian civil war.
The Israeli state’s gamble of starting yet another bloody war will no doubt cost the lives of many Palestinians and Lebanese. However, far from bringing about the ‘safety’ of Israeli border regions, it will make the situation far more dangerous and far worse - not just for Arabs, but also for the Jewish population.