Netanyahu wants the war to go on as long as possible to save his political skin. From The Cradle’s Lebanon correspondant at thecradle.co:
With diminishing strategic gains from Israel’s Gaza war and internal and external threats to his prime ministership, an embattled Netanyahu may choose war with Lebanon to prolong his political survival.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Forced into a Gaza truce by an angry public demanding prisoner exchanges, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces his toughest challenge since launching air and land assaults on the Gaza Strip in October.
The frequency of his threats to both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Israel’s northern front has spiked since Netanyahu’s reluctant acceptance of the Qatar-brokered truce.
While the prime minister and Washington’s goals align on waging a war on the Palestinian resistance, and, by extension, on Gaza, their policies diverge on the strategy and duration of the conflict. Faced with threats of its own and attacks by resistance factions in West Asia, the US prefers employing a leveraged military approach without any extensive involvement on the ground.
Lately, the Biden administration has been taking a sterner approach towards Tel Aviv’s actions in the northern Gaza Strip, and has called for Israeli coordination with the US on the ground war. Hours ahead of the truce being implemented, Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored that “the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale that we saw in Northern Gaza [should] not be repeated in the South.”
