The resistance [Hezbollah] will not let this
happen again. Israel doesn’t allow us to be
safe; why should they be safe?’
This was the minimum his supporters
needed to hear and the rhetoric might have
been a substitute for action. But then Nas-
rallah directly addressed Israel’s soldiers
on the border. ‘What happened last night
will not pass... Get ready. Starting tonight,
wait for us. One, two, three days, just wait
for us.’ Having made such a specific threat,
it would be an unthinkable humiliation for
Hezbollah to stay its hand now. This does
not necessarily mean firing some of the
150,000 missiles it is said to have pointing at
Israel. That would invite a devastating Israe-li response and every Hezbollah neighbour-
hood already has martyr posters tacked to
the lampposts, the losses from Syria. But per-
haps there will be sniping across the south-
ern border, the place where Lebanon’s last
war with Israel began, in 2006. Or an attack
on Israel by Hezbollah in Syria.
Hezbollah is itching to do this because
Israel has been regularly hitting it in Syria.
In the most recent incident, two of its
fighters were killed in an Israeli drone strike
in Syria last weekend. And in Iraq, too,
Israel has bombed Shiite militias loyal to
Iran. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Net-
anyahu tweeted: ‘Iran has no immunity any-
where... If someone rises up to kill you, kill
him first.’ The cynics accuse Netanyahu of
electioneering by drone strike. He faces thevoters in two weeks, an election that for him
is a matter of personal, as well as political,
survival: he needs the new Knesset to grant
him immunity from prosecution on corrup-
tion charges. As Nasrallah said in his speech:
‘Netanyahu knows that his destiny is either
in the prime minister’s office or in prison.’
Alternatively, all of this could be the
usual, grinding, low-level, tit-for-tat vio-
lence that always threatens to blow up into
something bigger but which — since 2006,
in the case of Israel and Lebanon — always
subsides, until it doesn’t. There is, however,
another possibility. It is that Israel is acting
in the belief and the expectation that, sooner
or later, America will bomb Iran. And then
Iran will use Shiite militias in Iraq, Syria and
Lebanon to hit back at American interests
and allies, especially Israel. The Israelis are
getting ready for this.
They have been preparing for the con-
frontation with Iran for years. An American
lawyer who does business with the Saudi roy-
als told me that soon after the Crown Prince,
Mohammad bin Salman, was appointed,
he made a secret flight to Tel Aviv to meet
Netanyahu. The meeting was to discuss an
attack on Hezbollah and by extension, Iran,
the lawyer said. The Saudis were ready to do
it, he went on, but the Israelis said it wasn’t
the right time. This might be another crazy
MBS story — there are many — but the law-
yer was right about one thing: the Israelis
and the Saudis have a common interest in
destroying Shia power in the Middle East.
You might even call it a secret alliance.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are the two
countries that Donald Trump respects and
listens to the most. America’s confrontation
with Iran, over Iran’s nuclear programme,
is off the front pages for the moment, but a
couple of small missteps by either side could
be enough to start a war. The mullahs in Teh-
ran are under crippling economic sanctions
and will do whatever it takes to maintain
their grip on power. They might well pro-
voke another shipping incident in the Strait
of Hormuz, something that could make
President Trump change his mind about air-
strikes — he said he had called the planes
back mid-air last time. The drone ‘strike’ in
Lebanon is part of a long phoney war. But
everyone is preparing for the possibility that
it will turn into a real one.Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent.BeirutI
n the early hours of Sunday, two military
drones dropped out of the sky over the
southern suburbs of Beirut. More pre-
cisely, they fell on Dahieh, usually referred
to in wire service reports as the Hezbol-
lah stronghold of Dahieh — Hezbollah, or
the Party of God, being the Shiite militia
in Lebanon that takes its orders from Iran.
One of the drones hit the Hezbollah media
centre and exploded. Mobile-phone video
showed an anxious crowd in the streets out-
side. Everyone voicing an opinion assumes
the drones are Israeli. The first was brought
down by children throwing stones. Was the
second sent in to destroy it? Or was this an
Israeli attack? No one knows.
What happened matters less now than
what Hezbollah thinks happened. To find
that out we turned to a contact in Dahieh;
let’s call him ‘Mo’. Mo is well-known to most
of Beirut’s foreign press corps. He was once
a drug dealer in America. He’ll show you
a photograph of himself in outsized shorts,
flashing a gang sign. He’ll tell you about the
time he got a new load of smack and shot up
a street bum to test its purity. The bum died,
glassy-eyed, sitting in the front seat of Mo’s
car. He had to drive around with him, police
cruisers passing by, until he could dump the
body in a trash can — hilarious!
Mo isn’t your typical Hezbollah support-
er, then. But if you need, for example, to find
a Syrian refugee selling a kidney, or to know
what Hezbollah intelligence is thinking, not
just what its press officers are saying, Mo is
your guide to Dahieh’s underbelly.
And Mo is moving out, right away. His
secret policemen friends have told him
things will escalate, and they’re emptying
their offices too. ‘Hezbollah has no choice
but to return fire. Its credibility is on the
line. There will be revenge. No question
’bout dat.’ Perhaps Mo’s past as a drug deal-
er has led him to take a pessimistic view of
any given situation and of human nature in
general (though this never seems to get him
down). Others have their suitcases packed
but they aren’t leaving right away. Most
are waiting to see what Hezbollah’s leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, will say.
Later that day, Nasrallah made a speech
before his supporters in the usual way, on
a big screen, his location secret because
of the threat of Israeli assassination. ‘We
will do whatever we have to to stop this...The phoney war
The Middle East waits for the US to bomb Iran
PAU L WO OD
‘But things have improved no end
since Jamie’s Italian closed.’The Israelis and the Saudis
h ave a common int erest in
destroying Shia power