If the opportunity arises, Alaa Qassem says he is ready and willing to give his life for Palestine.
The 24-year-old drapery seamstress was born in Syria, but he has spent most of his life in Lebanon. Many people in the country fear that Lebanon will be dragged into the war raging further south between Israel and the armed groups in Gaza. But fear isn’t what Qassem and his friends expressed. They live in Beirut near the Shatila Refugee Camp, a site with a bloody history that is home to more than 11,000 Palestinians. They feel a deep affinity towards Palestine, and as border clashes between Israel and armed groups in southern Lebanon intensify, they hope for an opportunity to cross into Israel to fight for the liberation of Palestine.
“If the government removes the border between Lebanon and Israel, half of the Lebanese people will go and fight shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians,” Qassem said while hanging out at a cafe on Thursday night.
Neither Qassem nor his Lebanese and Palestinian friends belong to any of the armed groups fighting Israel along the Lebanese border. But they fully support Hamas and feel close solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
“Fighting the enemy is a duty,” he said. “Because we are Muslims, it is our duty to fight for our land.”
Such religious conviction left him feeling disappointed on Nov. 3 when Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Shia movement Hezbollah, delivered a message suggesting that Lebanon’s involvement in the Israel-Hamas war will be limited — at least for now. In a widely watched speech broadcast from an undisclosed location, the head of the armed political group declared the war to be a Palestinian one and said that Hezbollah is playing a supporting role.
“He talked about everything we already know about,” Qassem said. “We were waiting to start the war in order to go to jihad. When he was not talking, he made Israel more afraid than when he spoke. We were waiting for another speech, not this kind of speech.”
Nasrallah’s message suggested that Hezbollah and its Palestinian allies in southern Lebanon would continue to wage the tit-for-tat battle with Israel that they have since Oct. 8, one day after Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Since then, border clashes have steadily intensified as Israel has pushed forward with an air campaign and ground invasion of Gaza that has left more than 11,000 Palestinians dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
The fierceness of the Israeli military campaign has heightened concerns about what a full-scale war in Lebanon would bring. Many fear that such a war would be even worse than the last one between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, which left over a thousand Lebanese and 100 Israelis dead and swaths of Lebanon’s infrastructure destroyed. Today, an acute 4-year-long economic crisis compounded by political dysfunction leaves the country and its citizens in no condition to face a war.
Experts described Nasrallah’s message as a balancing act. While on one hand, he seemed to distance Hezbollah from the fighting in Gaza, he did not entirely rule out the possibility of deeper engagement.
“All options are open on our Lebanese front,” Nasrallah said. “We say to the enemy that might think of attacking Lebanon or carrying out a pre-emptive operation, that this would be the greatest foolishness of its existence.”
In the week since Nasrallah’s speech, fighting along the Lebanese-Israeli border has further escalated, albeit in a contained fashion. On Nov. 5, an Israeli airstrike killed three children and their grandmother, raising the civilian death toll in Lebanon to at least 10, according to Lebanese security officials. The following day, Hamas’ military wing in Lebanon fired a barrage of rockets toward the Israeli city of Haifa, a distance deeper into northern Israel than previous attacks. Such cross border attacks persist with no signs of abating, leaving scores of combatants and civilians dead and injured on both sides as fighting also escalates elsewhere in the region.
Regional Clashes
In recent weeks, Iran-aligned groups in Iraq and Syria have stepped up attacks against US troops. In a message to reporters on Nov. 7, a US military official speaking on background said that US troops and their partners in Iraq and Syria had been attacked 40 times since Oct. 17. A few thousand US troops are in both countries ostensibly to help prevent the Islamic State (ISIS) from making a resurgence in the region. Iran-backed groups had attacked US forces before the start of the current Israel-Hamas war, but the attacks in recent weeks are a notable uptick. US officials have said that the attacks are unrelated to Washington’s support for Israel, despite Iran-backed groups in the region explicitly stating otherwise.
In the past month, the US has carried out three waves of airstrikes against sites it says belong to Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and affiliated groups. US officials have described the attacks as being meant to protect its forces and not aimed at escalating tensions.
Michael Young, senior editor at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center think tank, said the attacks by the Iran-backed groups are meant to pressure Washington into reigning in Israel’s campaign against Hamas and Gaza. “They know that [US President Joe] Biden doesn’t want to be tied up in another Middle Eastern war,” he said. “And it seems to be working, because all the news now is that the Americans are not willing to give Israel an open ended amount of time to end its operation.” While Israel has not stopped its military campaign on Gaza, it has agreed to daily four-hour pauses in northern Gaza to allow civilians to flee.
Further afield, Iran-backed Houthi rebels have also joined the fray. Over the past few weeks, the group has fired missiles and drones from 2,000 kilometers away toward Israel. As a member of the Axis of Resistance – a coalition of armed groups across the Middle East led by Iran – experts say the Houthis’ attacks serve more of a symbolic gesture rather than posing an actual strategic threat against Israel. But on Nov. 8, the Houthis seemed to take their involvement a step further by shooting down a US MQ-9 drone performing surveillance over Yemeni territorial waters.
Tehran has warned that the situation in the region is a powder keg, but so far Iran and Israel have publicly said they do not seek a larger conflict. Still, in such an environment, there is a serious risk for miscalculation.
Such attacks from across the Middle East have heightened concerns that the war between Israel and Hamas could explode into a regional conflict. Young sees the attacks as being part of a calculated strategy by the Axis of Resistance to exert additional pressure on Israel. “While they’re respecting the rules of the game in terms of the Hezbollah-Israeli relationship, they are trying to widen the potential scope of actions [along the other fronts] in such a way… to sort of set new rules of engagement with Israel.”
Since the eruption of hostilities last month, Hezbollah and Israel have abided by an unwritten understanding of acceptable confines and limits of military clashes. In practice, that has seen attacks between the two sides focusing primarily on military targets with an effort to minimize civilian casualties.
Tehran has warned that the situation in the region is a powder keg, but so far Iran and Israel have publicly said they do not seek a larger conflict. Still, in such an environment, there is a serious risk for miscalculation.
“This is a very high risk game that is being played by both sides,” Young said. “But they have made really a significant effort to try to avoid it degenerating into a much wider conflict.”
So has the US. At the same time that it has expanded its military presence in the region in an effort to deter escalation, US officials have also been meeting and speaking with counterparts across the region. Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped a trip across the region that included meetings with Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Turkish officials. The US defense secretary has also spoken with regional counterparts, including with the Israeli defense minister on Saturday. During that call, he reportedly stressed concerns about border clashes escalating. That conversation came days after a US envoy met with officials in Lebanon.
Calls for De-Escalation
Such efforts have reassured Hezbollah’s long-time rival, the Christian political party the Lebanese Forces, its foreign affairs head said last week. The party lacks the hard power of Hezbollah, but as the largest Christian party in Lebanon’s parliament, the Lebanese Forces represents a chunk of the country wishing to avoid entanglement in the conflict between Palestinians and Israel.
“We’re against dragging Lebanon into this kind of war, because it’s gonna be destructive for Lebanon,” said Richard Kouyoumjian, head of the party’s foreign affairs department. Like other political actors, the party has been meeting with foreign governments to try to prevent the border clashes from escalating. Publicly and in their meetings with foreign governments, the Lebanese Forces have doubled down on their calls for the enforcement of a UN resolution to have Hezbollah withdraw from southern Lebanon and allow the Lebanese military and UN peacekeepers to handle security along the border.
“We’re sure that under the auspices of UNIFIL (the UN peacekeeping force stationed in southern Lebanon), with the pressure of the United States, we can reach a calm and we can reach security on the border for both sides,” said Kouyoumjian.
