By Liam Stack
With Israel hurtling toward a full-blown war with Hezbollah, the United States is working to broker a short-term cease-fire between the two, hoping to avert a wider war and revive stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a U.S. official said Wednesday.
The new diplomatic push by the United States came amid more signs Wednesday that the conflict is heating up. Hezbollah fired a missile at Tel Aviv for the first time, a reminder it still has the ability to reach deep into Israel’s urban core despite losing many of its top leaders. The Israeli military said it shot down the missile, which did no serious damage.
At the same time, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, told soldiers stationed at the northern border with Lebanon that the airstrikes Israel had launched since Monday were intended “to prepare the terrain” for a possible ground incursion. The Israeli military also called up two brigades of reservists and sent them to the border.
Israel continued its barrage of attacks Wednesday, with the military saying it had struck about 280 sites in Lebanon by midafternoon. At least 51 people were killed and 223 others wounded in airstrikes since Wednesday morning, the Lebanese health minister said.
Hezbollah also fired dozens of rockets at northern Israel, although Israeli missile defenses intercepted many of them. One rocket struck a home in Kibbutz Sa’ar, outside the city of Nahariya, spraying shrapnel that injured two men, one of them seriously, rescue workers said.
Here’s what else to know:
— Israel’s strikes have spread panic and desperation across Lebanon and displaced roughly 500,000 people, according to Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry. Civilians have clogged the main roads leading to Beirut, the capital, while some have sought safety in the mountains and farther north. The U.N. refugee agency said thousands had fled to Syria from Lebanon in recent days, in a reversal of the decade-long flow of refugees in the opposite direction.
— Israel at the U.N.: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was expected to travel to New York on Thursday for the U.N. General Assembly, where the conflicts in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip have been high on the agenda. This week, President Joe Biden again called for a cease-fire in Gaza, and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned, “The world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.”
— Intense air raids: In recent days, Israel has unleashed on Lebanon some of the heaviest aerial attacks in the history of modern warfare, outpacing the bombardment of Gaza during the opening days of the Israel-Hamas war that began in October, war experts said. Strikes Monday killed more than 550 people and injured an additional 1,800, one of the highest daily death tolls of any recent global war and Lebanon’s deadliest day since its 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
— Focus on Gaza: The families of Israeli hostages in Gaza fear their loved ones will be forgotten as Israel’s attention and military resources turn to the escalating conflict to the north. Dozens of the 250 hostages taken by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attacks remain captive in Gaza. Israeli authorities have declared that more than 30 hostages are presumed dead in Gaza.
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