As Israel pounded targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, a member of the country’s war cabinet threatened action on a second front, along the northern border with Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah has fired rocket barrages into Israel.
“The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out,” Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and former defense minister, told reporters Wednesday. “If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the I.D.F. will do it,” he said, referring to Israel’s military.
“The next stages in fighting will also be deep, forceful, and surprising,” added Mr. Gantz. “The campaign will continue and expand, according to necessity, to more foci or fronts.”
The threat of a wider war has preoccupied the United States and its allies since the start of the conflict in Gaza, and has only grown as three Iranian-backed groups — Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis in Yemen — have launched attacks toward Israel as well as on commercial ships in the Red Sea.
The concern prompted the United States to dispatch two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel that started the war in Gaza.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that its northern command, along the border with Lebanon, was in a “state of very high readiness.” The military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said, “We need to be prepared to strike if required.”
Tensions rose even higher this week after Iran accused Israel of killing Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, in a missile strike in Syria. On Wednesday, a cortege of mourners accompanied his body through the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, and a representative of the Revolutionary Guards, Ramezan Sharif, again threatened retaliation against Israel, The Associated Press reported.
But hints of division among Israel’s adversaries emerged on Wednesday, when Mr. Sharif claimed that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was prompted not by longstanding grievances with Israel, but by the 2020 killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. Hamas promptly rejected the suggestion.
