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Lebanon border for LA TIMES
A halfway war pulses on Israel’s border with Lebanon. Will it escalate?
Six months ago, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group and political party Hezbollah staged a rare military exercise for the media to show what it had in store the next time it tussled with Israel. The mood, triumphalist and threatening, was typical for the group, which positions itself as Israel’s nemesis and the standard-bearer of Palestinian resistance.
Yet, despite Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza and the enclave’s worsening humanitarian nightmare, Hezbollah has unleashed little of its boasted firepower on Israel’s northern flank. In the first weeks of the Israel-Hamas conflict, all eyes were on northern Israel — on the opposite end of the country from Hamas’ attack — in expectation of a Hezbollah strike across the Lebanese border. After all, the group is the lodestar of the so-called Axis of Resistance, a constellation of Iran-backed factions that includes Hamas itself and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq, and pro-government militants in Syria.
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