With Gaza cease-fire negotiations teetering, fighting and rocket attacks aren’t letting up.
Hezbollah and Israel exchanged significant attacks over the past two days.
Hezbollah sent more than 200 projectiles into northern Israel on Aug. 20, and the next day, it launched what Israeli media called a “massive” salvo of 50 toward private homes in the Golan Heights, injuring at least one person and setting a house on fire.
Israel retaliated to the first with an airstrike on Hezbollah weapons storage facilities in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on the night of Aug. 20, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the next day.
The strike was near the city of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, populated mainly by the Shi'ite Muslims from whom Hezbollah draws its support. Hezbollah said the attack killed one and injured 19.
The IDF also said an Israeli airstrike at Sidon, Lebanon, killed Khalil Hussein Khalil Al-Magdah, a terrorist who, with his brother Mounir Al-Maqdah, directs terrorist activities and smuggles weapons into the West Bank on behalf of Hezbollah and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, meanwhile, killed at least 50 Palestinians in the previous 24 hours, the Hamas-controlled health ministry said on Aug. 21.
The IDF said it had hit about 30 targets throughout the Gaza Strip—including tunnels, launch sites, and an observation post.
IDF troops killed “dozens” of armed fighters and captured weapons, it said.
Cease-Fire Proposal
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up his visit to the Middle East on Aug. 21 without yet securing a cease-fire deal.Blinken had earlier called this round of negotiations “a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to terms put forth by mediators from the United States, Qatar, and Egypt.
Hamas, the terrorist group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, has not agreed to participate in this round of talks. Qatar and Egypt represented their interests.
Netanyahu added a demand. He said Israel wouldn’t give up control of the Philadelphi Corridor on Gaza’s Egyptian frontier, in order to limit Hamas’s ability to rearm.
Netanyahu reportedly said he might have managed to convince Blinken, but a U.S. official on Aug. 20 disputed that and called Netanyahu’s statements “not constructive to getting a cease-fire deal across the finish line.”
Talking to two Israeli groups—one representing the war’s victims and another composed of relatives of the Gaza hostages—Netanyahu also said on Aug. 20 that he won’t necessarily make a deal.
“If there is a deal, it will be one that safeguards those [Israeli] interests which I have repeatedly stressed, which is preserving Israel’s strategic assets,” Netanyahu told the groups, according to a statement the groups put out.
On Aug. 21, his office addressed the issue with a public statement.
“Israel will insist on the achievement of all of its objectives for the war, as they have been defined by the Security Cabinet, including that Gaza never again constitutes a security threat to Israel. This requires securing our southern border,” his office said.
Egypt agreed not to set a timetable for corridor withdrawal as a precondition for a deal to swap hostages for Palestinians whom Israel is holding prisoner, a Lebanese newspaper reported.
Israel did agree to reduce the number of soldiers stationed along the corridor to prepare for a later withdrawal.
Israel remains in a ready posture for an attack by Iran and its proxies following the airstrike killing Hezbollah’s top military commander outside Beirut on July 30 and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas, in Tehran on July 31.
Israel has claimed responsibility for the first attack but not the second.
Iranian leaders have sworn to retaliate but so far have not.
They were said to be giving the latest round of cease-fire negotiations a chance while planning to strike if no deal was reached.
A wider war is feared if Iran launches a concerted attack, perhaps aided by proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Israeli jets in recent days carried out a mid-air refueling exercise, something necessary for much longer-range sorties than they typically fly into Gaza or Lebanon.
It was seen as a warning to Iran.
On Aug. 21, Israel’s outgoing head of military intelligence took personal responsibility for the intelligence failures leading to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel that started the Gaza war.
“The failure of the intelligence corps was my fault,” Major General Aharon Haliva, a 38-year military veteran, said at his resignation ceremony.
He called for a national investigation to study and “deeply understand” what led up to the war.
Haliva announced his resignation in April.
