Israel to have ‘difficult’ time against Hezbollah if escalation grows: US intel.

A US intelligence assessment says it would be difficult for Israel to succeed against the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah if the situation in the region escalates further.

In a report published by The Washington Post on Sunday, the US daily quoted a new secret assessment from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as saying, “It will be difficult for Israel's army to succeed because its military assets and resources would be spread too thin given the conflict in Gaza.”

Underlining that Hezbollah has well-trained fighters and tens of thousands of missiles and rockets, the paper referred to a Friday speech by the Lebanese resistance movement’s leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, who vowed a response to Israeli attempts aimed at the expansion of war on Lebanon’s southern areas.

The American daily also said Biden had dispatched his top aides to West Asia with a "critical objective" to prevent a full-blown war from erupting between Israel and Hezbollah.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to arrive in Israel on Monday where he will discuss specific steps to “avoid escalation,” his spokesman, Matt Miller, said before boarding a plane to Tel Aviv.

“It is in no one’s interest — not Israel’s, not the region’s, not the world’s — for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza,” Miller said.

Israel conceals ‘heavy losses’ as Hezbollah operations ‘very exhausting’: Nasrallah

The secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah says Israel is concealing the “heavy losses” it has suffered in the war on the southern Lebanese border as the resistance movement’s operations against the occupying regime are “very exhausting.”

The paper cited American officials as saying that they are concerned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may see an expanded war in Lebanon as key to his political survival amid domestic criticism of his cabinet’s failure to prevent the surprise attack by Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups against the occupied territories in early October.

“In private conversations, the administration has warned Israel against a significant escalation in Lebanon.”

The paper argued that American officials fear that a full-scale conflict between Israel and Lebanon would surpass the bloodshed of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war on account of Hezbollah’s substantially larger arsenal of long-range and precision weaponry.

“The number of casualties in Lebanon could be anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 and entail a massive evacuation of all of northern Israel,” Bilal Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, was quoted as saying by The Post.

Hezbollah may strike deeper into Israel than before, hitting sensitive targets like petrochemical plants and nuclear reactors, Saab said.

Stressing that Israeli pilots are tired and airplanes have to be maintained and refitted, the expert said they would face more dangerous missions in Lebanon than in Gaza.

Pointing to Netanyahu’s precarious political career after the Gaza war and his tendency toward broadening the conflict, Saab said, “The political logic for Netanyahu is to rebound after the historic failure of October 7 and have some kind of success to show to the Israeli public.”

“I’m not sure going after Hezbollah is the right way to do it because that campaign will be far more challenging than the one in Gaza.”

Since October 8, the day after the Israeli onslaught against Gaza started, the frontier between Lebanon and the occupied territories has seen deadly exchanges of fire, mainly between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.

Reports say Israel has repeatedly used US-supplied internationally-banned white phosphorus munitions in its attacks on Lebanon’s territory.

Nearly three months of cross-border fire have killed 175 people in Lebanon, including three journalists.  

In northern occupied territories, at least 13 Israelis, including nine soldiers, have been killed, according to Israeli authorities.

Hezbollah pounds Israeli aerial surveillance base with 62 missiles

Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance group says it has hit an Israeli aerial surveillance base with scores of missiles in its first response to Tel Aviv’s assassination of a deputy political leader of Hamas.

The assassination of Hamas’ Deputy Chief Saleh al-Arouri by the Israeli regime in southern Beirut on January 2 has raised fears of further escalation.

The Israeli regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s atrocities against Palestinians. The relentless military campaign has killed over 22,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured around 57,910 others.

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