A senior military official reportedly recently told the
Media Line that Israel has prepared a partial evacuation plan for areas close
to the border with Lebanon in anticipation of a renewed war with Hezbollah, the
Jerusalem Post reported.
“We know that [Hezbollah
Secretary General Hassan] Nasrallah wants to harm Israeli civilians and he is
using psychological warfare against our citizens,” he said in an exclusive
briefing with the Media Line, an American news agency specializing in the
Middle East region, the Post reports. “But we also believe that
Nasrallah is acting out of weakness because he has lost about 1500 fighters in
Syria.”
According to the unnamed
official, the Israeli assessment is that neither side actually wants war with
the other, but “there could be escalation or miscalculation on both sides.”
The condition of the
publication of this information was that no identifying titles of the officer
or where the briefing occurred be published, demonstrating that officials can
disclose any information to the press they want without being held accountable
for the veracity of the information. At the end of the day, anonymous leaks to
the press still don’t substitute real evidence, and as such, prior to
publication, Anti-Media could not confirm if these evacuation plans have
begun or if they are legitimate.
Regardless, as Anti-Media
has previously explained, both sides have been
preparing for the next war for years. Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah, recently
warned that the next war could take place within Israel’s territory. As the Post
reports, Hezbollah believes Israel is behind the death of one of its military
commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, who died in Syria last year. Curiously,
thousands of Lebanese citizens received voice and text messages saying
Nasrallah was behind the murder. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the messages,
suggesting a deep level of psychological warfare has been deployed between
these two sides already.
According to the Israeli
official, Hezbollah has 100,000 rockets that could cover all of Israel.
However, “90 percent” of these are short-range rockets with a range of about 28
miles – ultimately nothing more than peanuts compared to Israel’s rapidly
advancing defense system.
Yet Israel is clearly
concerned with this Iranian proxy army, certainly more so than they
are concerned with ISIS or any of the other Sunni-led terror groups operating in Syria.
Considering Hezbollah is bolstered
by the Iranian government and has the support of
the Syrian government, the potential for this war to spiral out of control
is too great to risk. Complicating matters, a war with Iran is potentially opening up on multiple
fronts, and this
could be another indirect route through which anti-Iran countries can seek to
undermine Iranian influence and finalize the neoconservative dream of completely dominating the
entire region.
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