Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made a stop in Beirut on his tour of the Middle East and promptly raised the temperature in the region, threatening to unleash Hezbollah on Israel if the IDF carries out its threatened ground assault on Gaza. Amir-Abdollahian said he met Friday with Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and discussed various scenarios that could take place.
“I know about the scenarios that Hezbollah has put in place,” Amir-Abdollahian said. “Any step the resistance (Hezbollah) will take will cause a huge earthquake in the Zionist entity.”
“I want to warn the war criminals and those who support this entity before it’s too late to stop the crimes against civilians in Gaza, because it might be too late in [a] few hours,” he added.
Hezbollah has about 100,000 men under arms, but only about 15,000 are highly trained shock troops. These are the battle-scarred veterans of the Syrian civil war — the Radwan Force. The rest are cannon fodder who would be sacrificed in any war against Israel, protecting the trained fighters.
Similarly, Hezbollah’s 150,000 missiles and rockets are mostly highly inaccurate Grad rockets — the same kind of rockets Hamas fired into Israel at the start of the war. But Hezbollah also sports several hundred deadly accurate Iranian Shabab missiles and sophisticated anti-tank missiles that many Middle East experts say might be a “game changer” if Hezbollah were to go “all in” in a war against Israel.
Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas may very well have decided that this is the moment that calls for maximum effort to humble Israel. The images of hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, the dysfunction of the U.S. Congress, the age and infirmity of the U.S. president, and the distraction of the war in Ukraine have combined to — possibly — embolden Iran to let slip their Hezbollah and Hamas dogs of war.
On the other hand, Iran itself is weak and unstable. Its military is a shell of its former self with aging American equipment mixed in with some modern Russian weaponry.
Any attack by Hezbollah will almost certainly force Israel to attack Iran. And given the domestic unrest in Iran, the mullahs would be insane to provoke a war with Israel.
A more likely scenario is Hezbollah continuing to launch a few rockets at Israel, more in solidarity with Hamas than any attempt to provoke Israel into a war.
So the Iranian Foreign Minister’s meeting with both Hezbollah Leader Nasrallah and the UN envoy to the Middle East Tor Wennesland was mostly for show. And his threats were as empty as Iran’s promises.
With an eye toward Hezbollah, President Joe Biden has warned other players in the Middle East not to join the conflict and has sent American warships to the region and vowed full support for Israel.
The Iranian foreign minister said he will be contacting U.N. officials in the Middle East because “there is still an opportunity to work on an initiative (to end the war) but it might be too late tomorrow.”
Once the Israeli ground assault gets going in Gaza, the delusion of Iran offering a “peace initiative” will vanish. Iran will be limited to kibitzing from the sidelines, calling out Israel for war crimes — real and imagined — and trying to organize a pro-Hamas coalition.
It’s not going to have much luck with that.
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