Countdown to Middle East war? How the region can step back from the brink

[Edge Guerrero]

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With Israel poised to attack Iran, having already blindsided friends and foes alike with its blitz against Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, all the talk is of an inexorable slide towards a new, pan-Middle Eastern war.

Yet brakes remain to halt a regional fall into a wider conflagration that would lock Israel and Tehran into escalating conflict and suck in other nations, according to several people with experience in intelligence and military decision-making.

Israel is unlikely to flinch from launching an aerial barrage on Iran as soon as in the coming days in retaliation for Tehran’s decision to launch about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday, the experts told Reuters.

“Whoever attacks us – we attack them,” Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his security cabinet on Tuesday night, summing up his doctrine of deterrence.

Israeli officials have, nonetheless, told US counterparts their response to Iran’s attack will be “calibrated”, though have yet to provide a final list of potential targets, according to a person in Washington familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.

“I think that the targets that will be selected, will be meticulously, very carefully selected,” said Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and a negotiator during the Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, of the 1980s and 2000s. Sites of Iranian military importance such as missile infrastructure, communication centres and power plants are likely candidates, he added.

Israel is less likely to hit the oil facilities that underpin Iran’s economy or its nuclear sites, according to many of the experts interviewed, who include more than half a dozen former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials from the United States and Middle East.

These highly sensitive targets would be expected to draw an escalated Iranian response including the potential targeting of the oil production sites of US allies in the region including Gulf Arab states, they said.

US President, Joe Biden, said on Thursday he would not negotiate in public when asked if he had urged Israel not to attack Iran’s oil facilities, hours after he contributed to a surge in global oil prices when he said Washington was discussing such Israeli strikes.

Israel has surprised much of the world with the scale of its offensive against the Hezbollah group, from the detonation of thousands of members’ pagers and walkie-talkies, to the assassination of leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a Beirut air strike and a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.

“It would be unwise for outsiders to try to predict Israel’s attack plan,” said Norman Roule, a former senior CIA officer who served as the US intelligence community’s top manager for Iran from 2008 to 2017.

“But if Israel decides on a proportional yet substantial strike, it may elect to limit its attacks to Iranian missile and IRGC-Quds Force architecture that supported attacks by Tehran and its proxies on Israel.”

The Quds Force is a branch of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards military unit.

Roule, senior adviser to the United Against Nuclear Iran advocacy group, said Israel could strike Iranian installations that refine gasoline and diesel for domestic consumption while sparing those that load oil exports, depriving Tehran of a justification to retaliate against the facilities of Gulf states and limiting a spike in crude prices.

Iran: A cautious adversary

Any wider Middle Eastern conflict is unlikely to resemble the grinding ground wars of past decades between opposing armies.

Only two sovereign states, Israel and Iran, have so far militarily locked horns over the past year, and they are separated by two other countries and vast tracts of desert. The distance has limited their exchanges to strikes by air, covert operations or the use of proxy groups such as Hezbollah.

Iran has long vowed to destroy the state of Israel, yet has proven to be a cautious adversary in this crisis, carefully calibrating its two aerial attacks on Israel, the first in April – after Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing several commanders – and the second, this week, after Nasrallah’s killing.

The only reported death from Iran’s two attacks was a luckless Palestinian hit by a missile casing that fell from the sky into the West Bank on Tuesday.

Egypt, which fought wars with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and signed a peace treaty in 1979, is widely thought to have little interest in getting pulled into the conflict. Syria, an Iranian ally which has also battled Israel in the past, is sunk in economic collapse after a decade of civil war.

The wealthy Gulf states, close US security partners, want to steer clear, too. Two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that Gulf ministers held talks with Iran on the sidelines of a conference in Qatar on Thursday, seeking to reassure Tehran of their neutrality in any escalation that could engulf their oil production sites.

The United States says it will defend Israel to the hilt against their common foe, Iran and its proxies, but no one thinks it will put boots on the ground like it did in the two Gulf wars in 1990 and 2003 when it went to war against Iraq.

Nuclear sites in sight?

War is already a grim reality for many in the region.

The 7 October attack on Israel by fighters from Palestinian group, Hamas, killed 1,200 people, while the ensuing Israeli battering of Gaza has killed nearly 42,000 people and displaced almost all the enclave’s 2.3 million population, according to local officials and UN figures.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

Clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have also forced thousands of families in northern Israel and southern Lebanon from their homes.

The United States is not pressing Israel to refrain from military retaliation against Iran’s latest attack – as it did in April – but encouraging a careful consideration of potential consequences to any response, according to the person in Washington familiar with the discussions.

Washington has proved to have limited influence over Israel though, and Netanyahu has remained implacable about the targeting of his country’s enemies since the Hamas attack.

“The Israelis have already blown through any number of red lines that we laid down for them,” said Richard Hooker, a retired US Army officer who served in the National Security Council under Republican and Democratic presidents.

The US presidential election on 5 November also means Biden’s powers of persuasion are limited during his final months in the White House.

Biden told reporters on Wednesday that Israel has a right to respond “proportionally”. He has made it clear he does not support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, where Israel and Western states say Iranians have a programme aimed at building nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

Hooker said targeting such sites was possible but not probable “because when you do something like that you put the Iranian leadership in a position to do something pretty dramatic in response”.

Israel, which is widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state though neither confirms nor denies that it possesses such weapons, has long considered Tehran’s nuclear programme an existential threat. Iran’s nuclear sites are spread over many locations, some of them deep underground.

Oil facilities: ‘Hit them hard’

In Washington, whose sanctions on Tehran have failed to shut down Iran’s oil industry, there are calls for strikes on refineries and other energy facilities.

“These oil refineries need to be hit and hit hard because that is the source of cash for the regime,” US Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, said in a statement.

For Arab states on the other side of the Gulf, action targeting Iranian oil facilities would set off alarm bells, fearing a vengeful Tehran.

Saudi Arabia, which until the Gaza war was in talks on a US defence pact and a possible normalisation deal with Israel, saw its oil sites come under attack in 2019 from the Houthis in Yemen, where the Kingdom was embroiled in conflict for years.

Oil prices have traded in a narrow range of $70-$90 per barrel in recent years, despite the war between Russia and Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East.

Analysts say OPEC has enough spare capacity to cope even if all Iran’s production was knocked out. But it would struggle to compensate if an escalation damaged oil capacity in the producer group’s linchpin, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241004-countdown-to-middle-east-war-how-the-region-can-step-back-from-the-brink/

[Masato]

Netanyahu is a madman.

The world must come together to stop this genocidal supremacist nonsense.

USA needs to break free of their grip once and for all.

I hope I see it in my lifetime

[Edge Guerrero]

Netanyahu is a madman.

The world must come together to stop this genocidal supremacist nonsense.

USA needs to break free of their grip once and for all.

I hope I see it in my lifetime

- The thing is uS will defend Bibi for every crime.

[Masato]

Netanyahu is a madman.

The world must come together to stop this genocidal supremacist nonsense.

USA needs to break free of their grip once and for all.

I hope I see it in my lifetime

- The thing is uS will defend Bibi for every crime.

Only the corrupt politicians. My hard guess is that the majority of Americans don't really give too many fucks about Israel, and would be appalled if they knew exactly how much of their tax dollars gets extracted over to them, or how much influence Israel actually has in US politics and media.

Honestly I think once the cat is out of the bag, Americans might just finally put a stop to it one way or another.

[Edge Guerrero]

Netanyahu is a madman.

The world must come together to stop this genocidal supremacist nonsense.

USA needs to break free of their grip once and for all.

I hope I see it in my lifetime

- The thing is uS will defend Bibi for every crime.

Only the corrupt politicians. My hard guess is that the majority of Americans don't really give too many fucks about Israel, and would be appalled if they knew exactly how much of their tax dollars gets extracted over to them, or how much influence Israel actually has in US politics and media.

Honestly I think once the cat is out of the bag, Americans might just finally put a stop to it one way or another.

- Israel is doing a onslaught. And even Kamala protects this.

[Edge Guerrero]

Israeli strike on hospital tent camp kills 4 and ignites a fire that burns dozens
A year into the war, Israel is still carrying out near-daily strikes across the Gaza Strip. The military is waging a major ground assault in the north, where it says militants have regrouped.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and triggered a fire that swept through a tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.

The Israeli military said it targeted militants hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.

Several secondary explosions could be heard after the initial strike, but it was not immediately clear if they were caused by weapons or fuel tanks.

Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.

Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

Israel is still carrying out near-daily strikes across the Gaza Strip more than a year into the war, and has been waging a major ground assault in the north, where it says militants have regrouped.

The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while Palestinian militants abducted around 250 hostages. Around 100 are still being held inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but says women and children make up more than half the fatalities. Around 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times, and large areas of the coastal territory have been completely destroyed.

Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of Gaza, estimated at around 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north heeded Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and have not been allowed to return.

That has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals in which it would order all civilians out of northern Gaza and label anyone remaining there a combatant — a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say would violate international law.

The plan has been presented to the Israeli government, but it’s unclear whether it has been adopted. The military says it has not received such orders.

Israeli rights groups on Monday called on the international community to prevent Israel from carrying out the plan, saying there are “alarming signs” that Israel is beginning to implement it.

The statement, signed by B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, warned that states “have an obligation to prevent the crimes of starvation and forcible transfer.”

With no end in sight to the war in Gaza, Israel is also waging an air and ground war in southern Lebanon against the Hezbollah militant group, an ally of Hamas that has been firing rockets into northern Israel for more than a year. Israel has also threatened to strike Iran in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack, raising the prospect of an all-out regionwide war.

A Hezbollah aerial attack on an army base in northern Israel killed four soldiers — all of them 19 years old — and severely wounded seven others Sunday, the military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago.

Hezbollah called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defense systems during the assault by drones.

Israel’s national rescue service said the attack wounded 61. It’s rare for so many people to be wounded by drones or missiles, most of which are intercepted by Israel’s multitiered air defenses or fall in open areas.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/14/israeli-strike-hospital-tent-00183579

[Megaterio Llamas]

[Megaterio Llamas]

[Edge Guerrero]

- I think the war will gret bigger with Syria now!