(ANTIMEDIA) — A senior military official reportedly recently told the Media Line that Israel has prepared a partial evacuation plan for areas close to the border with Lebanon in anticipation of a renewed war with Hezbollah, the Jerusalem Post reported.
“We know that [Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan] Nasrallah wants to harm Israeli civilians and he is using psychological warfare against our citizens,” he said in an exclusive briefing with the Media Line, an American news agency specializing in the Middle East region, the Post reports. “But we also believe that Nasrallah is acting out of weakness because he has lost about 1500 fighters in Syria.”
According to the unnamed official, the Israeli assessment is that neither side actually wants war with the other, but “there could be escalation or miscalculation on both sides.”
The condition of the publication of this information was that no identifying titles of the officer or where the briefing occurred be published, demonstrating that officials can disclose any information to the press they want without being held accountable for the veracity of the information. At the end of the day, anonymous leaks to the press still don’t substitute real evidence, and as such, prior to publication, Anti-Media could not confirm if these evacuation plans have begun or if they are legitimate.
Regardless, as Anti-Media has previously explained, both sides have been preparing for the next war for years. Hezbollah’s leader, Nasrallah, recently warned that the next war could take place within Israel’s territory. As the Post reports, Hezbollah believes Israel is behind the death of one of its military commanders, Mustafa Badreddine, who died in Syria last year. Curiously, thousands of Lebanese citizens received voice and text messages saying Nasrallah was behind the murder. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the messages, suggesting a deep level of psychological warfare has been deployed between these two sides already.
According to the Israeli official, Hezbollah has 100,000 rockets that could cover all of Israel. However, “90 percent” of these are short-range rockets with a range of about 28 miles – ultimately nothing more than peanuts compared to Israel’s rapidly advancing defense system.
Yet Israel is clearly concerned with this Iranian proxy army, certainly more so than they are concerned with ISIS or any of the other Sunni-led terror groups operating in Syria.
Considering Hezbollah is bolstered by the Iranian government and has the support of the Syrian government, the potential for this war to spiral out of control is too great to risk. Complicating matters, a war with Iran is potentially opening up on multiple fronts, and this could be another indirect route through which anti-Iran countries can seek to undermine Iranian influence and finalize the neoconservative dream of completely dominating the entire region.
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