“At the end of the war, Israel may pay a heavy price and not achieve its goals,” says unnamed American official.
By World Israel News Staff
The U.S. is warning Israel that a war against Hezbollah could have potentially devastating consequences for the Jewish State, after an Israeli MK threatened that Beirut would “look like Gaza” in a number of days.
“There is no war in lab conditions. It’s not a game. I don’t doubt the capabilities of the IDF, but we have to think about the fact that there will be serious consequences for both sides,” an unnamed American official was quoted by Axios as saying at a closed-door meeting during the MEAD Conference in Washington D.C. over the weekend.
“There is an idea of ’let’s go to war and then we will destroy all the missiles Hezbollah has and everything will be fine.’ It’s not that simple. There is no magic solution. The other side cannot be annihilated,” the official added.
“At the end of the war, Israel may pay a heavy price and not achieve its goals,” the official said. They then suggested that a “diplomatic agreement” could end the fighting.
For eleven months, the Lebanon-based terror group has launched near-daily rocket, missile, and drone barrages against civilian and military assets in northern Israel, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes.
While the fighting so far has mostly been confined to cross-border tit-for-tat attacks, displaced northerners are pressuring the Israeli government to achieve a decisive military victory over Hezbollah that would enable them to return home.
“I think it’s time to deal with the north. We cannot keep standing on the sidelines and watching ourselves lose the north. We will make a decision. Hezbollah isn’t willing to move from the border, so we need to deal with this with a mighty war. Our patience has run out,” Likud MK Nissim Vaturi said on Sunday morning.
On Monday, an explosive drone fired by Hezbollah struck an apartment building in the northern city of Nahariya. The blast caused extensive damage to two apartments. No one was physically hurt.