| | 24/09/2024 Tuesday briefing: How to make sense of the new wave of violence in the Middle East | | | | Nimo Omer |  |
| | | Good morning. At least 492 people have been killed after Israeli jets struck more than 1,300 alleged Hezbollah targets across Lebanon yesterday, in the most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes. Roads were heavily congested with civilians desperate to flee the assault. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has accused Israel of seeking to create a wider conflict that Iran does not want to get directly dragged into. The bombardment follows a week of dizzying escalation in the region, with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies killing 42 people and leaving thousands injured, against a backdrop of intensifying rocket exchanges. The unprecedented assaults left Lebanon’s militia group humiliated, with its leaders vowing revenge. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Peter Beaumont, a senior Guardian international reporter, about the potential fallout of the intensification of this conflict. That’s right after the headlines. | | | | Five big stories | 1 | Labour | The Conservatives’ “violent indifference” to the arts has resulted in communities across the country getting poor access to culture, Lisa Nandy has said ahead of a planned funding review. The culture secretary accused her Tory predecessors of “vandalism” as she pledged to get state funding to every community and make sure that private philanthropy reached beyond the major cities. | 2 | Housing | Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society, is to let first-time buyers borrow up to six times their earnings in what has been labelled a “gamechanging” move that ramps up the mortgage price war. | 3 | Environment | Rich countries could raise $5tn, five times the money that poor countries are demanding in climate finance, through windfall taxes on fossil fuels, ending harmful subsidies and a wealth tax on billionaires, research by the pressure group Oil Change International has shown. | 4 | NHS | Nurses in England have rejected the 5.5% pay rise they were given for this year, in a move that may lead to further strikes in pursuit of higher salaries. | 5 | France | A French court has begun hearing the cases against six new defendants as the mass rape trial that has sparked horror in the country entered its fourth week. Dominique Pelicot, who has admitted to the allegations, is accused of enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his drugged wife over nearly a decade. |
| | | | In depth: ‘Israel has moved on from the somewhat agreed upon red lines’ | | After last week’s headline-grabbing pager explosions (for more, see Thursday’s newsletter), Hezbollah launched more rockets into northern Israel, where schools remain closed, in retaliation, which was followed by a deadly Israeli strike in a residential neighbourhood in Beirut that killed the commander of Hezbollah’s most elite unit and dozens more people. And over the weekend, Israel pummelled parts of southern Lebanon, striking 400 Hezbollah targets. As promised, Hezbollah responded, launching 150 missiles deeper into northern Israel than ever before. Israel’s military is ramping up its attacks in the hopes that the militia group will fall back, but that has not happened. Instead, the leader of the group, Hassan Nasrallah, said: “Threats will not stop us … We are ready to face all military possibilities”, adding that “we have entered a new phase, namely an open reckoning” with Israel. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that despite the devastating consequences of a full-blown regional war, they plan to continue the assaults. In a statement released by his office, Netanyahu said: “We are not waiting for the threat to come, we’re pre-empting it.” It’s been referred to as “de-escalation through escalation”. The international community has been united in its condemnation: UN secretary general António Guterres has said he fears Lebanon could “turn into another Gaza”. President Joe Biden said the US would do “everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out” – though there is no sign of a ceasefire in Gaza any time soon, which is the only thing likely to halt rockets being fired into Israel from Lebanon, the attested goal of the Israeli assault. Hezbollah is one of the most heavily armed non-state militia groups in the world. Its army is tens of thousands strong and it is backed by Iran, so even though the attacks from Israel have put Hezbollah on the back-foot, it has not deterred them. “In militias like this the number two in command is always ready to step into the number one position,” Peter says. Destabilising an organisation that is inherently fluid in that way is not straightforward. And when all that is needed to keep parts of Israel uninhabitable are a few rockets fired over the border, it is hard to see how Israel can achieve its goal through force alone.
A new phase The latest attacks further compound the crisis of the cross-border conflict that Israel and Hezbollah have been locked in since October. “The pager attack was significant in its ambition and most clearly signifies that Israel has moved on from the somewhat agreed upon red lines,” Peter says. Both sides have acknowledged that their conflict of attrition, limited in its geography and scope, has entered a far more critical phase. As their airstrikes intensify, the Israeli military have flown jets low above Beirut to create thundering sonic booms that shook the capital, with critics decrying the tactic as a form of psychological warfare against civilian populations. “It’s not just Hezbollah, Lebanese society is feeling under attack,” Peter says. Civilians are confused and fearful, fleeing cities and villages as the Israeli military issued evacuation orders before bombardments began.
A ground invasion | | Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel is willing to take “whatever action is necessary” against Hezbollah, triggering concerns about a ground invasion. Though an anonymous Israeli military official told AP that there are no immediate plans to put boots on the ground and they are focused on aerial operations, “the issue is that air power alone doesn’t usually win these kinds of wars,” Peter says. “Israel has been training very hard for fighting in the particular mountainous terrain in southern Lebanon so they are ready,” he adds. “From Hezbollah’s point of view, the way that they’re set up in the south, they can fight much more effectively if Israeli tanks cross the border.” A full scale conflict would inevitably drag the US, Iran and its proxies into some kind of direct confrontation – something that neither country is ready for and has been trying to avoid since 7 October. However Israel’s escalations are making that harder.
Spread too thin? Israel’s strategic justification for the escalation is that it wants to meaningfully and decisively defeat Hezbollah by pushing them north of the Litani river and having them agree to withdraw their forces, thus protecting Israeli civilians who live close to their northern border. Hezbollah have shown that they have the military capability and will to continue fighting and they will only stop firing rockets if there is a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which still seems remote. Unlimited aerial bombardment would be devastating to Lebanon, but “attrition is baked into the proposition of groups like Hezbollah so the idea that a punitive campaign is likely to be effective in destroying [them], I think is mistaken,” Peter says. As the conflict escalates on the south Lebanon border, and tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border are displaced, Israel’s military is at risk of becoming overstretched. “It is effectively operating on three fronts at the moment, in terms of two conventional conflicts in Gaza and the border with Lebanon, and also a very complicated security situation in the West Bank,” Peter says. “That is a big ask for any military.” | |
| | What else we’ve been reading | | In case you missed it, I loved this Observer interview with Succession star J Smith-Cameron, now making her London stage debut opposite Mark Rylance. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters There is a lot of concern about the short and long term impact of smartphone usage on children. Amy Fleming asked four kids who don’t have phones how they feel about being untethered from a time-sucking metal brick – even though all of their friends have one. Nimo Is adding cream really molto offensivo? How about onions? Rachel Roddy’s got a recipe for carbonara like it’s 1979, that strikes the balance between tradition and taste. Hannah The new season of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent is out and it’s well worth a listen. For episode one, Grace is joined by the artist Rag’n’Bone Man to discuss oven chips and Shania Twain. Nimo This week’s How we made is on Jet’s 2003 earworm Are You Gonna Be My Girl, a song the band admit is “more I Want to Hold Your Hand than WAP”, and whose innocent charm has stood the test of time. Hannah
| | | | | Sport | | Football | The Friedkin Group has agreed a deal to buy Everton, two months after pulling out of talks to purchase Farhad Moshiri’s 94.1% shareholding. The US company, owned by the billionaire Dan Friedkin, held constructive negotiations with Everton’s majority owner over the weekend as it sought to gazump interest from the Crystal Palace co-owner John Textor. Boxing | Anthony Joshua insists his career is “far from over” after his fifth-round knockout defeat by Daniel Dubois at Wembley Stadium on Saturday. Joshua was aiming to become a three-time world champion by claiming the IBF world heavyweight title but instead suffered a damaging setback – the fourth of his career – after he was knocked out in front of a record-breaking official attendance of 98,128. Formula One | Drivers are united ahead of talks with the FIA over the Max Verstappen swearing row that engulfed the Singapore Grand Prix, amid widespread dissatisfaction with the sport’s governing body. | |
| | The front pages | | The Labour conference dominates front pages on Tuesday, as the Guardian says “PM vows to end gloom as Labour seeks to lift spending restrictions”. The Telegraph leads with “Light at end of this tunnel, PM tells Britain”. The i reports “Reeves looks at cutting benefits to find spending boost”, while the Financial Times has “Reeves stokes borrowing rules debate with signal on higher capital spending”. The Times leads with “Labour to crack down on benefit fraudsters”. The Mail says “Union boss: we’ll seize control of UK economy”. The Mirror reports on Labour’s “Hillsborough Law”, under the headline “Victory for truth and justice”. Finally, the Sun looks to Nick Knowles future on Strictly Come Dancing, with “Nick’s strictly S.O.S”. | | | | Today in Focus | | Inside a secret summit of Afghan women’s rights activists Annie Kelly reports from a conference in Albania where Afghan women have spoken publicly about the Taliban’s brutal crackdown on their freedom. | | | | | Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings | | | | | The Upside | A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad | | A few years ago, 63-year-old Alida Alequin took an online ancestry test, “just for fun”. The results changed her life – and her family’s – more than she could have imagined. The test revealed a 22% match with a man who, she would go on to discover, had been abducted in the early 1950s from a playground in California. Her uncle Luis Armando Albino was taken at age six and raised by a couple who pretended he was their own child. Albino was missing for more than 70 years until Alequin started searching through old photos and newspaper clippings. Her inquiries turned up a picture of Luis as a boy with his brother, Roger, that prompted police to open a new missing persons case. Investigators tracked down Albino on the east coast and, with the help of the FBI, he was reunited in California with some of his family, including his brother and sister. “We didn’t start crying until after the investigators left,” Alequin said. “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.” Alequin wants this happy end to a sad story to inspire other people. “I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing,” she said. “I would say: don’t give up.” Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday | | | | Bored at work? | And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. | | | | | | | | We call the shots on all our stories.
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