Israel says time running out to reach diplomatic solution in Lebanon

Israeli officials have hinted that the “diplomatic hourglass” is running out to reach a negotiated solution to the escalating fighting on the boundary with Lebanon, even as the war in Gaza continues at a ferocious pace.

The comments echoed similar warnings from two Israeli ministers. Security sources said the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah fired the most rockets and weaponised drones on Wednesday that it had in a single day since the recent series of daily clashes across the border began.

Israel and the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah have traded near-daily volleys of missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the UN-controlled blue line separating the countries since 7 October, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing 1,140 people and taking up to 250 hostage. About 150 people in Lebanon have been killed, including 17 civilians, and 11 in Israel, including four civilians, with tens of thousands in both countries displaced from their homes.

Map showing UN demarcation line between Israel and Lebanon.

A report from Israel’s Kan radio on Thursday, after a particularly intense rocket salvo hit the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, quoted a government source as saying that the parties were “approaching the point when the chance of reaching an agreement that might guarantee that Hezbollah was distanced from the border would be exhausted … The sand in the diplomatic hourglass in Lebanon is running out.”

Those remarks followed comments by the foreign minister, Eli Cohen, after a trip to the north on Wednesday. He said: “There are only two options – a political solution or military operation. What existed prior to 7 October won’t any more … We will grant a certain amount of time for a political solution. And if none is [reached], all options are on the table”.

Another minister, Benny Gantz, said that the “situation on Israel’s northern border demands change”.

“The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out; 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 IDF will do it,” he said at a press conference.

Militias allied with Tehran across the Middle East have launched drones and missiles towards Israel, disrupted international shipping in the Red Sea and attacked US military assets in the region in the wake of 7 October. Israel’s retaliatory war on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has already become one of the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century, with estimates suggesting more than 21,000 people have been killed, 55,000 injured, and 85% of the territory’s 2.3 million people forced to flee their homes.

Israeli tanks advanced deeper into the central Gaza Strip on Thursday as part of its widening offensive against Hamas, despite international calls for a ceasefire. Days of relentless bombing of several overcrowded refugee camps near the central town of Deir al-Balah – all areas the military had told Palestinians to seek shelter earlier in the war – have led thousands more families to flee into Deir al-Balah town, setting up tents wherever there is space.

Search and rescue efforts in Deir al Balah, after an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp destroyed residential buildings. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Farther south, Israeli forces struck the area around a hospital in the heart of Khan Younis, the Gaza Strip’s main southern city. Palestinian health authorities said 20 people were killed in the Khan Younis attack, and 210 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours.

The US has deployed military reinforcements in the region to deter further attacks on Israel, including the presence of aircraft carriers. But the longer the war in Gaza lasts, the greater the risk of miscalculation and regional escalation, which the Biden administration fears could draw in Iran. Earlier this week, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, described the country as already engaged in a “multi-front war”.

Washington and Paris are leading intense secret negotiations to de-escalate the hostilities on the Blue Line, which are believed to include the possibility of finally resolving disputed territory on the border and persuading Hezbollah to withdraw its forces north of the Litani river, about 35km away from the blue line.

The move would be in accordance with a UN resolution from the last war in 2006, but Hezbollah draws much of its grassroots support from the southern towns and villages closest to Israel, which were occupied for the better part of two decades before Israel withdrew its forces in 2000, and is unlikely to willingly concede its raison d’etre.

A senior European diplomat in the region said: “The tit-for-tat on the blue line is clearly and steadily getting worse. Hezbollah engages in this sort of brinkmanship from time to time but our prevailing assessment is that escalation is becoming more and more likely.”

Since the bloody summer war with Hezbollah in 2006 that left swathes of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, in ruins, both parties have been careful to avoid a return to full-scale conflict. Israel has not fought a two-front war since a surprise attack on Yom Kippur by Syria from the north and Egypt from the south 50 years ago, but public statements from Israeli officials are growing more bullish.

Gallant and others in the war cabinet argued for a pre-emptive strike against the militant group in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attack, a proposal that the US succeeded in quashing. But the conviction that a new war in Lebanon is inevitable appears to have taken hold among Israeli politicians, generals and a widening slice of the public: an opinion poll carried out in late November found that 52% of those surveyed favoured an immediate strike against Hezbollah, and only 35% were opposed to opening another front in the north.

“Nasrallah needs to understand that he is next in line,” Cohen said, referring to Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general. “If he doesn’t want this, he needs to force Hezbollah back to north of the Litani. All solutions are before us to bring our residents safely home.”

Despite growing divisions over the war’s conduct with the US, Israel’s most important ally, Israeli officials have said that Israel will push on until “complete victory” over Hamas. That goal, however, seems to be slipping further away, given the army’s inability to capture or kill Hamas’s leaders and in the face of fierce guerilla resistance in areas ostensibly under the army’s control. Israel’s military chief said this week that the war would last many more months, and ceasefire talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt appear to have stalled.

Maha Rafiq, a 46-year-old mother of five from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, said that she and her family had stopped thinking about when the war would end and were focused on day-to-day survival.

“We sleep and wake up to the incessant sounds of shells and gunfire. Every day, my husband and I venture out to search for food, uncertain if we will see each other again. In the market, we struggle to find even the simplest things and they are double the normal price. I have four daughters who need sanitary pads, but we cannot find them,” she said.

“I don’t know where we will go if the ground invasion comes here. We focus on how to stay alive, searching for shelter and moving from place to place.”