The Daily - An Escalating War in the Middle East

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Warning: This episode contains audio of war.Over the past few days, the simmering feud between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, has reached a critical moment.Ben Hubbard, the Istanbul bureau chief for The New York Times, explains why the latest tit-for-tat attacks are different and why getting them to stop could be so tough.Guest: Ben Hubbard, the Istanbul bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Israel says it killed a Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in an airstrike near Beirut.The Israeli military blamed Mr. Shukr for an assault on Saturday that killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Now to the Middle East, where fears of a wider war are growing. Over the past few days, simmering tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia on Israel's northern border, have reached a tipping point. A loud explosion has been heard in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A densely populated southern Dahya neighborhood showered in debris following a precision strike by Israeli fighter jets. Israeli military says it has carried out a strike targeting the Hezbollah commander

allegedly behind Saturday's deadly attack in the Golan Heights. Raising fresh fears of a wider war in the Middle East. With the State Department insisting an all-out war is not inevitable. But following tonight's attack has... Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard on why these attacks are different and why getting them to stop could be so tough. It's Wednesday, July 31st. It's Wednesday, July 31st.

So Ben, The Daily has been following the war in Gaza and the risk that it could spread to the broader region. And over the past few days, there have been this series of attacks on Israel's northern border, the border with Lebanon. And they really felt like a ratcheting up and potentially even a turning point. So we're talking to you on Tuesday afternoon in New York, and we want to dig into what happened. Tell us what we know so far. Well, it's after midnight here in the Middle East, and we're still reporting out exactly what happened. What we know is that Israel carried out an airstrike on a building in a southern suburb of Beirut that targeted a senior military official in Hezbollah, part of the city where Hezbollah basically runs the show. They largely destroyed a building, and Israel has claimed that they succeeded in assassinating a senior military leader in Hezbollah. And this all comes in the context of this ongoing exchange of attacks across the Lebanese-Israeli border that have been going on since near the start of the Gaza War.

While the focus has been mostly on Gaza, there's been the secondary battle taking place across Israel's northern border. This is between Israel, one of the most sophisticated militaries in the Middle East, and on the Lebanese side, Hezbollah, which is an Iranian-backed militia that is probably one of the most powerful non-state militias in the world. This is a hostile border. It's been hostile for decades. But since the war in Gaza started in October, Hezbollah began striking targets inside of Israel across the border. It is a regional ally of Hamas and said that it wanted to basically help Hamas out by trying to bog down Israeli forces in the north so that they couldn't focus all of their energy on the south. And this has continued to escalate. There have been strikes on both sides. There have been

more than 150,000 people displaced from communities on both sides of the border. There have been hundreds of people killed. But all along, there's been this idea that both sides didn't want this to escalate into another gigantic war. But of course, the risk when you have two military powers striking each other on a daily or sometimes hourly basis is that somebody's going to make a mistake. Right. Somebody's going to strike something that they shouldn't strike or carry out a strike that kills too many civilians.

And, you know, that that's going to kind of put the other side on the hook for retaliation. And this is basically what everyone has been worried about for the last nine months. And so all of a sudden, we seem to have reached that point where we're very much kind of on the precipice of seeing whether, you know, this is really about to launch into a new level of conflagration. Ben, where did this begin? How did this new precipice you're talking about start? So what we saw on Tuesday was an Israeli retaliation to a strike on Saturday that killed 12 teenagers and children in an Israeli-controlled town. So tell us what happened on Saturday. So just after 6 p.m. in a town called Majd al-Shams, which is in the Golan Heights, this is territory that Israel occupied in the 1967 war.

Many of the residents there are from the Arab Druze minority. Many of them are not even Israeli citizens. There are, you know, kids, teenagers out playing soccer. Siren goes off. And then within a few seconds, some sort of a rocket comes down, hits the edge of the soccer pitch. And it all happened incredibly quickly. And this was the deadliest attack inside of Israel since October 7th in terms of civilian deaths. Twelve people killed in one day, one attack. And this has sent this sort of shockwave through Israel that how can we allow this to happen? And tell me about the response to this, Ben. Who claimed responsibility? Well, earlier, Hezbollah had said that it was striking

targets along the border. There are military bases in the area that, you know, Hezbollah considers fair game in terms of sort of the rules of this battle as it's taking place. But as soon as it became apparent that this had killed civilians and especially civilian children, Hezbollah very quickly issued an on-the-record denial saying we had absolutely nothing to do with this, which is something that they don't usually do. Israel said it was clear that this strike had come from Lebanon and they accused Hezbollah of launching it. And this was largely, they said, due to the kind of rocket that had been used and that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanon that has this kind of rocket. The U.S. government has

said that they support the Israeli findings. So Hezbollah is denying it, but the U.S. and Israel say it's pretty conclusive it was their rocket. What happens? Well, inside of Israel, there's very quickly a sense that there needs to be some kind of a response. And the fact that it is civilians and that it's children, there's very quickly a sense that there needs to be some kind of a response. And the fact that it is civilians and that it's children, there's just this sense that Israel needs to do something, that it needs to hit back. And so for the last few days, everyone in the region has really been on tenderhooks waiting to see what is this response going to be? How big is it going to be? And then, of course, after that, what will Hezbollah's response be to that?

And that brings us to the strike in Beirut on Tuesday. I'm curious about the calculations here for each side, you know, as we see things escalating. Why don't you start with Hezbollah? What's the thinking there? Well, it certainly would not be unprecedented for these two powers to go to war. They have a long history together that goes back to the 80s when Israel had occupied South Lebanon and Hezbollah formed underground to try to push them out. And they attacked Israeli forces and effectively succeeded in getting them out by 2000. Since then, Hezbollah has grown into something much, much more powerful than just an underground military force. Now they are a political party that has ministers in the Lebanese government. They have members of parliament. They work very closely with Iran.

They're sort of a linchpin of what is known as the Axis of Resistance, which is this group of Iranian-backed militias around the region that consider it their job to push back against Israel and to push back against the West. And the last time that this really blew up was in 2006. In 2006, Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid on some Israeli troops, ended up capturing two of them and killing some others. Israel responded with a tremendous attack on Lebanon. Israel launched a ground invasion. They bombed infrastructure across Lebanon, including bridges and the international airport.

invasion. They bombed infrastructure across Lebanon, including bridges and the international airport. And it was a very brutal 34-day war that basically ended with a standstill. So I was actually covering this war for The Times in 2006. And the thing that I really remember was, you know, the Israelis going in, kind of expecting it to be easier than it was, but it wasn't, and leaving after a month of very intense fighting. And on the Lebanese side, there were these extreme casualties, and, you know, most of southern Lebanon had been flattened. So very, very difficult, I think, for both sides in this conflict. Yes, it was an incredibly destructive war. There had been more than a thousand people killed in Lebanon, many of them Hezbollah fighters, but also many, many civilians, more than 150 people killed in Israel. And it was so destructive

that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, came out after the war and effectively apologized, told the Lebanese that if I had known how destructive this was going to be, we wouldn't have started it, which as far as I'm aware is probably the only time that he's ever come out and apologized for anything, certainly for anything that important. And I think the Israelis too realized that, you know, this was not a walk in the park. They could not just go into Lebanon very easily and sort of destroy this threat on their northern border. You know, this was a very formidable foe that they were dealing with. Okay, so both sides learned a very painful lesson in 2006, which is it can be quite difficult to take on the other in an all-out war. What has

happened since then? Well, I think from that lesson, they realized that they also needed to prepare for the next round. So Hezbollah regrouped with help from Iran and other supporters. It was able to build its military force, get more sophisticated weapons, more precise rockets. During the civil war in Syria, next door to Lebanon, which started in 2011, Hezbollah ended up playing a very powerful role on the crown, supporting President Bashar al-Assad, went in and sort of played a decisive role in a number of battles there, which killed a number of Hezbollah people, but also gave kind of a whole new generation of younger fighters on the ground experience with guerrilla warfare. And so going into October 7th, Hezbollah was a much, much stronger force than it had ever been

in its history. It had better weapons. It had more fighters. It was much more sophisticated. It had new kinds of technology, including drones. And then we see these capabilities when Hezbollah starts launching these attacks on northern Israel. Many of them are very precise, and they target Israeli surveillance posts. They target vehicles. They do kill some civilians, but we've seen Hezbollah launching drones that go deep into Israel, and then they broadcast the footage of what they saw. And Israel has responded to all this by striking Hezbollah harder and harder inside of Lebanon. So we've seen repeated strikes that have assassinated a number of prominent Hezbollah leaders. And this is destructive for people, you know, for civilians living on both sides of the border. There are somewhere around 60,000 Israelis who have fled northern Israel to go elsewhere in the border. There are somewhere around 60,000 Israelis who

have fled northern Israel to go elsewhere in the country. In Lebanon, the number is even higher. It's around somewhere close to 100,000 people who have left the south. And there have been many people killed. On the Lebanese side, there's more than 460 killed, probably around 100 of them civilians. And in Israel, you have more than 20 military people who have been killed. So the stakes really seem to be rising here. What does Hezbollah, this now very well-armed, very disciplined group that's like kind of partway between a militia and a country at this point, what does it say it wants? Well, their rallying cry, like that of their allies and Hamas and other groups around the region, is to destroy Israel. But in terms of their more immediate objectives, at this point they've gotten into this war for very specific reasons that they made clear after they started in October.

And Hassan Nasrallah made it very clear early in the war what exactly Hezbollah set out to do. He said, we are not looking to get into a gigantic war with Israel, but we want to help what he considers his brothers in Hamas and Gaza. And they were going to do this by striking the Israeli military on the northern border and trying to basically bog down part of Israel's forces. And they basically want to keep the pressure on Israel, and they have made it very clear all along that the only thing that will stop them from striking these targets in northern Israel is going to be the end of the war in Gaza. But that's something that, given the politics and pressure inside of Israel, is proving quite difficult for a number of reasons.

We'll be right back. So, Ben, you've laid out Hezbollah's strategy of putting pressure on Israel, you know, trying to get them to end the war in Gaza. But what about Israel? What are its considerations? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a pretty difficult spot when it comes to the war in Gaza. He promised at the start of this war that the two goals were to bring the hostages home and to destroy Hamas. And so far, Israel has really accomplished neither of these things. And it's been nine months of incredibly, incredibly destructive warfare because they want to make more progress in getting rid of Hamas in Gaza, and they want to

have something that looks like a victory and that ideally would involve bringing home the remaining hostages. On the other side, you have people who argue that the war has gone on long enough and now it's time for some kind of a ceasefire. So there have been repeated rounds of talks for some kind of a ceasefire with Hamas that would involve the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. So far, Hamas hasn't agreed to any of the proposals that have been made. And so this is where we are in this position where we're just kind of stuck between these competing pressures. So the leaders of Hezbollah say only a ceasefire in Gaza will get them to stop firing. But of course, the ceasefire in Gaza is, as you point out, quite stuck. So it

seems like Netanyahu's path to how he can respond here is actually pretty narrow. Well, he's also in a pickle when it comes to what to do about Lebanon. He's once again dealing with competing pressures from inside of his own government and inside of his own country. He, on one hand, has these same right-wing ministers who are saying that the only solution to Hezbollah is to basically reoccupy southern Lebanon. And as recently as this Monday, Blaise Smotrich, the finance minister, said in a speech that the only solution was to destroy Hezbollah, reoccupy southern Lebanon, and basically create a kind of buffer zone on Lebanese territory inside of Lebanon. And you've had other calls similar to this from other right-wing ministers. And these are not fringe figures.

These are people who are essential to Benjamin Netanyahu in holding together his coalition. They effectively have Netanyahu at their beck and call because if they leave the government, it would collapse. So what they say has a lot of weight in Israel right now. It is very difficult for him to ignore what they're advocating for. And at the same time, you have many people from the military establishment who are saying, at some point, we will need to deal with Hezbollah, but now is not the time. The forces are exhausted because of how long they've been fighting in Gaza, and that Israel is just not prepared to launch another gigantic war on its border. So now, Ben, it looks like we have the beginning of an answer, right? This attack in Beirut. I guess I'm wondering what you, Ben,

make of this attack, you know, on the escalation scale. Is it ratcheting things up? I think it's very hard this early on to gauge sort of where this falls on the scale, to be honest. This is not, of course, what Smotrich and sort of the far right in Israel would have wanted. This is not a full-scale invasion. We're not talking about mass strikes across large parts of Lebanon. But if this person is as senior as the Israelis say he was, being sort of a right-hand man to Hassan Nasrallah, somebody who was in charge of sort of the strategic arm of Hezbollah's whole military operation, taking him out and taking him out inside of Beirut is like a pretty serious assassination. And so I just, I think it's pretty hard to predict

whether this is something that Hezbollah feels like they can, you know, maybe respond in some sort of way that makes it look like they're not just accepting it, but doesn't sort of take this up another notch or whether they consider this, you know, the Israelis now crossing one of their red lines. So Ben, this is really quite a dramatic moment. And it's making me wonder where things go from here. I mean, we have this massive number of people displaced, this ratcheting up. Is this it? Are we now tipping into an all-out war? We're very much standing on a precipice.

We're in a very different place than we were just a few days ago. Then we were primarily watching this back and forth, tit for tat, that seemed to be organized in some kind of confines, that there was kind of a general understanding of what kinds of attacks you could do and how to keep this thing contained. And so the question right now is, is there any way for the sides to step back from this or is it going to get worse? I mean, I was in Lebanon the week before last and did a number of interviews with families who've been displaced from the south, living in quite poor conditions. And I mean, then their main concern was whether they would be able to go back, whether their homes were destroyed. And now the question is very much, is the whole situation

going to get worse? And are more people going to be displaced? My colleague, Isabel Kirshner in Jerusalem, did similar interviews on the Israeli side and found very similar things. Israelis who have been outside of their homes since early on in the war. And if this battle along the border escalates to another level, that's going to make it even harder for these people to return home. And so we're in a critical new stage here. And what the two sides decide to do in the next few days is going to really determine where this goes. Ben, thank you.

Thank you. As of Tuesday night, the death toll from the strike in Beirut had reached at least three civilians, including two children, and more than 70 people had been injured. And in a dramatic development early Wednesday morning, Hamas announced that its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had been assassinated in Tehran. A key figure in Hamas's leadership, Haniyeh was in Iran to attend the inauguration ceremony of the country's new president. The killing raised the specter of a wider war with Iran, which is likely to see the killing on its soil as an act of aggression by Israel. It could also complicate efforts for a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza, as Haniyeh was central to those talks. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you should know today. In Venezuela, at least 16 people have died and about 750 have been arrested as a result of protests following the highly contentious presidential election over the weekend. The nation's autocratic leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who claimed victory, has refused to release the full results, and many countries have said the vote was marred by widespread irregularities. Both sides of the country's political divide called on followers to take to the streets. And on Tuesday, the U.S. women's gymnastics team won its first gold at the Olympic Games in Paris, led by Simone Biles, who is now the most decorated gymnast in history, and

Sunisa Lee, the defending all-around champion. Biles called the Paris Games her redemption tour after she withdrew from the Games in Tokyo three years ago because of a mental block. Italy took home the silver and Brazil won the bronze for the all-around team event. Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Banja and Sydney Harper with help from Shannon Lin and Will Reed. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Patricia Willans. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Sophia Landman and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Isabel Kirshner, Farnoz Fasihi, Ewan Ward, and Huida Saad. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.