Widening Middle East war

The killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike by Israel on Friday has brought the Middle East to a dangerous inflection point. The war which began in the first week of October last year with the Hamas incursion in Israel has only widened and threatened regional stability. If the major powers do not immediately act to put a stop to this, the conflict could suck the other countries in, triggering global ramifications. Israel has already killed around 41,595 Palestinians including women and children  in retaliation for Hamas’s one-day attack that killed 1139 Israelis.  In addition, most of Gaza, otherwise a tiny strip of land, has been leveled, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

And with Hamas' challenge softened, Israel has shifted its attention to Gaza. Over the past week or so, it has mounted a series of precision airstrikes, killing senior Hezbollah leadership and topping this off with the assassination of Nasrallah, who has led Hezbollah for the past three decades.  He was the most powerful man in Lebanon, and responsible for making Hezbollah a powerful organization that in the 2006 war forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon.  He was also globally known, and very popular in Kashmir, where the news of his killing triggered protests, persuading the  political parties to also suspend election campaigning in response.

Although skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah were ongoing since the former’s invasion of Gaza,  it is now a full-blown hostility between the two. And at the outset only, Israel has seized the initiative. A week of intense bombardment and the killings of Nasrallah and the other senior leaders seems to have left Hezbollah in a vulnerable position.  But this may not necessarily be the case. As a part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance Hezbollah in the past has successfully defied Israel’s writ. The coming weeks and months will show how Hezbollah responds to the unrelenting Israeli onslaught.

The current state of affairs is fraught with regional and global repercussions. A wider regional war will not just cost thousands of lives and untold suffering but also destabilize the global economy. The world, therefore, needs to act and get the handle on the situation. To start with, we need an immediate ceasefire. But any ceasefire would be unsustainable in the long run, unless meaningful efforts are made to provide justice to Palestinians.