This past week has seen a sharp rise in the number of incidents on the borders of Israel. Some of them have been in the South, where there have been rockets, mortar fire, and attempts at infiltration by individuals armed with grenades, knives, and firearms. Others have been in the North, Iran continues to send weapons to Hizbullah. In turn, Hizbullah tries to establish operating bases in Syrian territory, The latest “incident” was an attempt to launch several commercial drones carrying explosives from Syrian territory. It is not clear to me whether this was a Hizbullah operation, or a pure Iranian one. Either way, the orders obviously came from Tehran.
The timing is especially interesting. Israel has an election coming in couple of weeks. i suspect that the Iranians are doing their best to avoid an incident of sufficient size to provoke a major response on either front. But they are also banking on reluctance by Israeli politicians to focus on terrorism during their electioneering. So far, the Israeli reactions have not been extreme. But they have been sufficiently strong to help incumbent prime minister Netanyahu earn a few points for his stance on protecting the country. Other political leaders would probably behave the same way.
The item that is of most concern is the threat of wider actions by Hizbullah leader Nasrallah. He is not known for making empty or purely bombastic threats. If he says there will be some future attack made by his organization it must be taken seriously. If he does something before the Israeli elections it might have wider implications. Seems to me that this is a very dangerous game.
Wetherhorn 