photo of a woman looking through broken glass.
A building hit directly by a rocket fired from Lebanon overnight, in the northern Israeli city of Acre. Jini/Xinhua via ZUMA

-Analysis-

PARIS — Sunday morning, it looked as if the Middle East’s long-feared region-wide war had finally begun.

All signs pointed to a major escalation: at dawn, the Israelis deployed around 100 fighter jets to bomb Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. These were preventive raids, Israel later declared. In response, the Lebanese Shiite movement sent hundreds of rockets, missiles and drones in the direction of Israel.

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Never before have the two sides mobilized so many military resources, at least since Oct. 7, which marked the start of this new phase in their confrontation.

Nevertheless, the escalation did not lead to all-out war. Not yet, not this time, one is tempted to add.

The belligerents have the classic grammar of proportionate response. Hezbollah had been proclaiming for weeks its intention to retaliate for the July 30 elimination of Fouad Chokor, a senior military leader of the Shiite movement. This has now been achieved, without necessarily triggering the fatal spiral of a regional war.

The first strike

The temptation of all-out war clearly exists on both sides. On the Hezbollah side, the growing number of casualties over the last ten months in the movement’s ranks, increases the desire for revenge.

They did not want to cross the Rubicon.

In Israel, calls for an all-out offensive to break Hezbollah’s back are heard, including within the Israeli government. The far-right Minister of Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, publicly challenged the head of the Shin Beth, the domestic intelligence service, who denounced the risk of Jewish extremist terrorism, telling him to “go and fight Hezbollah instead of criticizing us!”

But with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and in Teheran, where the most important decisions are taken, they did not want to cross the Rubicon. And in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is confronted with his own temptation to launch a massive operation in Lebanon to try to cripple Hezbollah’s military resources.

photo of black smoke in a town on a hill
Heavy black smoke from an Israeli air strike billows from the Lebanese southern border town of Khiam. Seven pro-Iranian Hezbollah militants and a child were killed in Israeli strikes across south Lebanon as armed group Hezbollah responded with artillery rounds and rockets across the border. – Marwan Naamani/ZUMA

Power of pessimism

The explanation is that neither Washington nor Teheran want this war, and have made and have made this clear. But the confrontation is not over, and yesterday’s fever pitch has not committed the irreparable, but it has also not settled anything.

The tangled web of crises in the Middle East remains unresolved. The war in Gaza continues, with its trail of destruction and death. Negotiators have been in Cairo since Sunday, despite the situation in Lebanon, to try and reach a ceasefire. Pessimism is de rigueur, as neither Hamas nor the Israeli government want it at this stage. Only the American and Arab sponsors do, but that’s not enough.

And then there’s Iran, which promised its own response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh last month in Teheran, and is keeping the suspense on that front.

Yet, even just the initial exchanges on Sunday give an idea of the destructive potential. Ultimately, the only way to avoid a regional confrontation is to stop the fighting in Gaza, but the logic of war there still has not run its course.