Potential successors to Nasrallah killed, Israeli ground operations in Lebanon… the latest on the war in the Middle East

Tensions in the Middle East have not subsided, Israeli bombings continue in Lebanon. We take stock of the situation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the Israeli military has killed potential successors to Hassan Nasrallah, the iconic Hezbollah leader himself killed in an Israeli strike in late September, as the IDF said it had begun operations in southwestern Lebanon.

In a video, Netanyahu said that Israel has “weakened Hezbollah's capabilities”. “We have eliminated thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself and Nasrallah's replacement, and the replacement's replacement,”, he continued, without giving the names of the senior Hezbollah representatives killed by the Israeli army.

Earlier in the day, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Hashem Safieddine, considered the likely successor to Hassan Nasrallah as leader of the Iran-aligned Shiite movement, had likely been “eliminated” by the Israeli army.

This new chapter in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah comes exactly one year after border clashes broke out following an attack by Palestinian Hamas on Israeli localities on October 7, 2023. Since then, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Lebanon in Israeli strikes, most of them in the last two years. weeks.

Some 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced. Israel says it is conducting ground operations in southern Lebanon to allow the return of some 60,000 Israeli citizens displaced by Hezbollah rocket attacks on the north of the country.

Hassan Nasrallah was killed on September 27 in a heavy strike carried out by the Israeli army on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital Beirut, after more than a week of intensive bombardment by the IDF across Lebanon and a few days before the start of ground assaults in southern Lebanon presented as "targeted" and intended to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure.

A "provocation"

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot denounced Tuesday a "provocation" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has threatened Lebanon with “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza” if it does not get rid of the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah.

“If this provocation were to be followed through, it would drag Lebanon, a friend of France that is already so fragile, into chaos. And that would pose even greater security problems for Israel than those that existed before the military operations in Lebanon”, warned Mr. Barrot, interviewed on public television France 2. “The situation in Lebanon is catastrophic”, he recalled.

For his part, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has decided to postpone an official visit planned for this week to Washington, thus pushing back a discussion with his American counterpart Lloyd Austin on the situation in the Middle East, the American Defense Department announced on Tuesday.

“We have just been informed that Minister Yoav Gallant has postponed his trip to Washington,”, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Israeli ground operations

The IDF announced Tuesday the deployment of a fourth military division to southern Lebanon, signaling an intensification of a ground operation that has been underway for a week now. This is the first contingent of IDF reservists to cross the border between the two countries.

The Israeli army has not said how many soldiers are now inside Lebanon. It is likely that there are several thousand. The announcement came as Hezbollah's number two, Naim Qassem, said the armed Shiite movement was leaving the door open to negotiations on a ceasefire with Israel, without linking them to the war in the Gaza Strip – the first in a year.

Western powers are keen to find a diplomatic solution, fearing a flare-up in the Middle East, while Israel has promised that Iran will “pay” the missile attack of unprecedented scale launched on October 1 against the Jewish state. Tehran said it was a response to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and a commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had expanded its ground operations in Lebanon, now conducting “limited, localized and targeted” operations in the southwest of the country, after initially carrying out assaults in the southeast. An IDF spokesman declined to provide the number of Israeli troops present on Lebanese territory at any one time. “This is a dynamic, limited type of operation, assaults that mean going in and out, different locations, different troops,”, Nadav Shoshani told a news briefing.

“Israel also has the right to win,”

In the pre-recorded video released late Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Hezbollah is more weakened today than it has been in many, many years”. The Israeli leader reiterated the right of the Jewish state to “defend itself”. “Israel also has the right to win. And Israel will win, he said, calling on the Lebanese to take back their country and return it to the path of peace and prosperity. Otherwise, he added, Hezbollah will continue to try to fight Israel from densely populated areas at your expense. (Hezbollah) doesn't care if Lebanon is dragged into a wider conflict.. Overnight Monday into Tuesday, Israel again pounded the southern outskirts of Beirut, where Hezbollah's headquarters are located, saying it had killed a budget and logistics official for the armed movement.