Iranian-backed militants and Israeli forces traded fire around northern Israel, heightening fears that the war in Gaza could spill into a broader regional conflict including Lebanon and Syria.
The Israeli military said it returned fire on Wednesday after Hezbollah militants in Lebanon fired rockets into Israel. A separate Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed three people, including two Lebanese-Australian citizens. An Iranian-backed Iraqi militia claimed responsibility for an uncrewed aircraft carrying explosives that crash-landed into part of the Golan Heights annexed by Israel.
The rise in violence comes after an airstrike in Syria on Monday killed a senior official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees a network of paramilitary groups throughout the Middle East. Israel is widely believed to have launched the attack but hasn’t claimed responsibility for it. At a funeral prayer service attended by thousands in Tehran on Thursday, Iranian leaders vowed to avenge the killing of the official, Sayyed Razi Mousavi.
The escalation in violence along Israel’s northern frontiers is raising concerns that its current war with Hamas in Gaza could spiral into an all-out confrontation with Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah movement and a range of other Iranian-allied militant groups across the region. Israel and Hezbollah have regularly exchanged fire since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that launched the current conflict, but international pressure, including from the Biden administration, has so far helped to keep the Israel-Lebanon front contained.
A full-scale confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah could be devastating for both sides. Hezbollah, with tens of thousands of battle-tested fighters and an arsenal of missiles and other weapons provided by Iran, is a far more capable adversary than the relatively lightly-armed Hamas. During the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, Israel heavily bombed Lebanon, including the Beirut airport and other civilian infrastructure, while Hezbollah rained rockets on Israel.
Containing hostilities between Israel, Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militia groups has been a central diplomatic aim of the Biden administration and other Western governments throughout the current war.
The Biden administration successfully convinced Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call off a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah days after the Oct. 7 attack, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Israeli leaders warned this week that they were growing impatient with Western diplomatic efforts as U.S. and allied officials worked to defuse tensions in recent weeks.
“The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out," said Benny Gantz, a senior member of the Israeli war cabinet, speaking on Wednesday. “If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the Israeli military will do it."
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that Israel was responding to Hezbollah fire and had killed more than 150 militants in Lebanon since the beginning of the war, including 129 members of Hezbollah. The figures couldn’t be independently verified.
“Hezbollah is paying a high price for its actions and will pay an even higher price if it continues doing this," he said on Wednesday.
The slow-burning conflict in Israel and Lebanon has taken place in parallel to Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza, where more than 21,000 people, most of them women and children, have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the authorities in the enclave. The number includes both militants and combatants. Hamas killed more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians, during the incursion inside Israel on Oct. 7, according to Israel.
The conflict has displaced more than 230,000 people from their homes in both southern and northern Israel since the start of the war, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office. It has also displaced more than 70,000 people from southern Lebanon.
Kiryat Shmona, with 24,000 residents, is the largest city in northern Israel to have been evacuated since the start of the war, and has been frequently targeted by Hezbollah fire. On Wednesday, 16 mortars were fired on the city, with damage to homes and public infrastructure, said Avihay Shtern, mayor of Kiryat Shmona.
Shtern said that he wouldn’t call on his residents to return to the city until Hezbollah is moved away from the border and the government can assure security. “We will not wait for a day when thousands cross the fence and we see the horrors that took place in the south of Israel," he said.
Across the region, an array of Iranian-allied militia groups have sided with Hamas in the conflict, including Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have launched attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea that it believes are heading toward Israel, disrupting a vital global shipping route.
The killing of Mousavi, the IRGC official, further heightened tensions with Iran. Speaking at his funeral on Thursday, the IRGC’s top leader, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, said Mousavi was one of the organization’s most important leaders and that Iran would take its revenge “in due time and place," according to the Iranian state-run news agency IRNA.
An IRGC official said earlier this week that the Oct. 7 attack had been carried out as revenge for the January 2020 U.S. killing of the IRGC’s top leader, Qassem Soleimani. Iranian officials later played down the statement, saying the attack had been a Palestinian initiative.
The barrage from Lebanon Wednesday came after an Israeli airstrike that killed three people including two dual Australian-Lebanese citizens. Australia on Thursday confirmed the deaths of two of its citizens and said it was investigating claims by Hezbollah that one of the people had ties to the group.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com
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