Israel has added the return of tens of thousands of its residents to their homes in northern Israel as a formal goal of its war against Hamas.
Visiting White House envoy Amos Hochstein met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sept. 16 to urge him to avoid opening a new front in Lebanon.
The Hezbollah terrorist group has fired thousands of rockets at Israel’s north, while Israel has been at war with Hamas in the south.
Israel ordered the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents from communities close to the northern border, and others left to avoid the constant air raids and danger.
Netanyahu told Hochstein that Israel would do “whatever is necessary” to bring home the residents.
“The Security Cabinet has updated the objectives of the war to include the following: Returning the residents of the north securely to their homes. Israel will continue to act to implement this objective,” Netanyahu’s office posted on X on Sept. 17.
“The prime minister made it very clear [to Hochstein] that it will not be possible to return our residents without a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.”
Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said the focal point of military action is moving from Gaza to Israel’s northern front.
Both he and Netanyahu told Hochstein on Sept. 16 that time was running out for a diplomatic solution and that heavier military activity could be inevitable.
The increased tension was already showing itself in Israel and Hezbollah’s air and rocket exchanges, which have escalated in recent weeks.
On Sept. 17, Lebanon underwent a stunning attack when Hezbollah members’ pagers exploded.
Lebanese state-run National News Agency reported some 2,800 people were injured in pager blasts and eight more were killed, including a child.
The agency reported most people injured in the mass of pager explosions sustained injuries to their hands.
Israel did not comment upon, nor take responsibility for, the attack.
The country often does not comment on attacks it has been accused of engineering, such as the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 with a bomb placed inside the guest house bedroom where he stayed.
Videos were posted on social media, and some were replayed on Lebanese television, capturing graphic images of the pager explosions.
One showed numerous wounded men, with injuries to their hands, midsections, or faces, in a hospital emergency room.
Another showed a man wounded when his shopping bag exploded as he looked for produce.
A third, apparently recorded by an overhead security camera, showed a man’s personal effect exploding as he stood at a cash register.
The cashier, who had been rearranging her drawer as she cashed the man out, fled when the blast occurred.
A fourth showed a man, apparently wounded on the street, being tended to by a passerby, who helped him sit on the sidewalk as he held a cloth to his head and then turned to get help.
A fifth showed a large crowd of people outside a Beirut hospital.
The attacks centered on the Beirut suburb of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The area was also the target of the July 30 air raid that eliminated Fuad Shukr. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), taking credit for that attack, called him Hezbollah’s “most senior military commander.”
The pager explosions were reported in numerous other Lebanese cities as well, and at least one was reported in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
Israeli military strategist Sarit Zahavi, who focuses on Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria and the threat posed there by Hezbollah and Iran, told The Epoch Times the victims included the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon and the sons of some senior figures in Lebanon, such as members of parliament.
The evidence, said Zahavi, a retired IDF lieutenant colonel in military intelligence, indicated the pagers beeped with a call and when their owners took them in hand, they blew up.
The attack, she said, showed the stunning capability of Israeli intelligence to penetrate machines and create a synchronized blast.
“I think that Hezbollah is now very much confused and surprised,” she said, enough so that it did not yet know how to respond.
The attack tore at the ability of Hezbollah’s military to communicate with each other, she said.
Zahavi said she hoped Hezbollah would understand the attack as a “message of warning,” a last chance to disarm in south Lebanon and come to the diplomatic table.
“This is what they need in order to bring the Israelis back to their homes. Israelis need to know that they are not going to be butchered and they are not going to be the victims of anti-tank missiles or any other missiles if they go back to their homes,” she said.
Otherwise, she said, Israel will take advantage “operationally” of Hezbollah’s confusion and crisis to achieve its goal.
Another Israeli strategist, Elliot Chodoff, a retired professor and IDF major who wrote the army’s tactical manuals, told The Epoch Times the strike was “elegant” in that it “changes all the rules.”
“This is not an aerial bombing. It’s certainly not a ground offensive,” he said.
“At the same time, it shows a major breach, and this [is] something Hezbollah is already admitting, the greatest breach of their security ever,” attacking the entire network simultaneously, he said.
He sees the attack’s elegance as still allowing for what the United States wants: a diplomatic solution.
“Israel can always say, ‘We sent them a message, and with all the double entendres, we sent it to their pagers, but we sent them a message,” he said.
“We can hit them. We can hit them hard. We didn’t launch a major attack or anything like that. Now is the time for them to come to the table if they want to.'”
Chodoff said he didn’t think this was likely, but it gives Israel deniability.
Meanwhile, military options, such as increased air activity or even a ground operation, are still on the table.
And the government can show the public, he said, that it’s taking action and not sitting back.
Another Israeli military strategist, Kobi Michael, told The Epoch Times the IDF has been preparing for the attack, repositioning its forces from Gaza.
“I think it will happen sooner rather than later,” he said.
He said he still hoped Hezbollah, seeing the preparation for all-out war, would come to the table.
“But the optimism in this regard is very low and there are no real expectations from Hezbollah, and from Iran, which backs it,” he said.
The U.N. in 2006 passed a resolution requiring Hezbollah to withdraw its military forces north of the Litani River, a river flowing roughly west about 10 miles north of the frontier, but the terrorist group has never done so.
The pager strike temporarily overshadowed tensions in the Israeli Cabinet.
Netanyahu was rumored to be about to replace Gallant with Gideon Sa'ar, a one-time ally in Netanyahu’s center-right Likud who left the party in 2020 and formed a new party after unsuccessfully challenging him for leadership.
Gallant has split publicly with Netanyahu over issues like the prime minister’s demand that the IDF keep control of Gaza’s frontier with Egypt.
Sa'ar, often more hawkish than Netanyahu on security matters, would strengthen the prime minister’s hand on domestic issues like his attempt to reduce the power of Israel’s supreme court and increase the authority of the legislature, something Netanyahu’s ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist coalition partners favor.
