Times of Israel – June 24, 2024
The top US military officer warned on Sunday that any Israeli military offensive into Lebanon would risk an Iranian response in defense of the powerful Hezbollah terror group there, and that US forces would be challenged to bolster Israel’s air defense umbrella.
Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iran “would be more inclined to support Hezbollah” than it does the Hamas terror group in Gaza, “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”
Brown spoke to reporters as he traveled to Botswana for a meeting of African defense ministers.
Israeli officials have threatened a military offensive in Lebanon if there is no negotiated move to push Hezbollah away from the border, after more than eight months of increasingly intense attack on towns and military posts in northern Israel.
Just days ago, Israel’s military said it had “approved and validated” plans for an offensive in Lebanon, even as the US works to prevent the fighting from spiraling into a full-blown war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he hoped a diplomatic solution could be reached but he would solve the problem “in a different way” if needed.
″We can fight on several fronts and we are prepared to do that,” he said.
The issue is expected to come up this week as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visits Washington for meetings with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior US officials.
US President Joe Biden’s senior adviser Amos Hochstein met with officials in Lebanon and Israel last week in an effort to de-escalate tensions.
Hochstein told reporters in Beirut on Tuesday that it was a “very serious situation” and that a diplomatic solution to prevent a larger war was urgently needed.
Brown said the US wouldn’t likely be able to help Israel defend itself against a broader Hezbollah war in as effective a manner as it helped Israel fight off an Iranian barrage of missiles and drones in April.
It is harder to fend off the shorter-range rockets that Hezbollah fires routinely across the border into Israel, he said.
Asked if the US has changed its force posture in the region to better assure troops are protected, he said the safety of the force has been a priority all along and noted that no US bases have been attacked since February.
The US continues to talk with Israeli leaders and warn against widening the conflict, according to Brown.
A key message being passed to them is “to think about the second order of effect of any type of operation into Lebanon, and how that might play out and how it impacts not just the region, but how it impacts our forces in regions as well,” he said.
Pentagon officials have said that Austin also raised concerns about a broader conflict when he spoke to Gallant in a recent phone call.
“Given the amount of rocket fire we’ve seen going from both sides of the border, we’ve certainly been concerned about that situation, and both publicly and privately have been urging all parties to restore calm along that border, and again, to seek a diplomatic solution,” said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, last week.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, and in recent weeks have staged attacks deeper inside northern Israel while threatening sensitive infrastructure in the major city of Haifa. The attacks have drawn a limited Israeli air campaign against the terror group and some of its top commanders in southern Lebanon.
The skirmishes on the border have resulted in 10 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 15 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries
Hezbollah has named 349 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing fighting, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 64 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have been killed.
A war between the two heavily armed foes could be devastating to both countries and incur mass civilian casualties. Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal is believed to be far more extensive than Hamas’s.
Hezbollah, Iran’s most important proxy in the region, says its attacks are aimed at supporting Hamas. Israel launched an offensive against the Palestinian terror group in Gaza after it attacked Israel in a shock onslaught on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.
An escalation in the conflict could also trigger wider involvement by other Iran-backed terror groups in the region.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Wednesday that leaders of terror groups and militias from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but he said the group already has more than 100,000 fighters.
Hezbollah was said to have warned Israel recently, “If we go to war we will bombard your country with missiles for three days. A continuous three days. There will be nowhere in Israel left standing.”
It’s not looking good for Israel and the US and both will be screaming for assistance from their vassals. They’ll be taking on a wide range of groups and armies, all able, courageous, motivated and well-armed. Their days of impunity will be brought to a swift, violent end.
Its all being choreographed & coordinated between Israel/USrael & the Arab-Muslim nations to progress their ‘Messianic end of day’ or WWIII script. All these arab-muslim countries are governed by Donmeh.
Thesis: Israel/USrael
Antithesis: OIC/BRICS/sham muslim terror orgs
Synthesis: WEF-UN Agenda 2030/WWIII/Third Temple/Whiteocide
Just read the bullshit. Iran has fired missiles from Iran?
Hezbollah has been elected. They run public services, they are the regime. You can’t call an organisation who can whip the Joos ass in a toe to toe fight.
The Times of Israel needs a better fitting arse cork.
There’s already a war between Hezbollah and Israel. If it escalates, Israel is finished, Nazi Amerika or not.
October 7 has been shown to be an Israeli setup and a pretext to brutalize Gaza for the purpose of provoking the ire of Arab nations in the area and around the world, and in justifying a war against Lebanon & Syria, and likely also to bomb Iran into submission and to take control of its vast oil and gas reserves. That clearly is what is going on. Israel can only expand by expanding its borders. The banksters and plutocrats of the West have an unsatiable appetite to control all global resources through their UN sustainability pretexts and though their wars.
Is Israel the tail of the US military dog waging it, or is it the sociopath dog wagging Israel? It does not matter which way we look at it, because the dog is on the Rothschild leash, and controlled as all of our nations are controlled by the debt-rigging international money power, backing and controlling all of the globalist scams & crimes against humanity, as well as all of these unjust wars to plunder the wealth of nations.
They have been systematically destroying the independence and integrity of our nations, and pushing stuff like the Woke agenda down our throats, but most of the people in the West are perfectly content with any atrocity committed against the people of other nations by their governments and their armed forces, as long as they serve their personal interests in some way. As an example, Greg Mannarino, the famous stock trader on YouTube, a few years back was decrying the Covid scam and the QE trillions enabling the largest wealth transfer in history to the Few. However, more recently when it comes to wars of plunder In the Mid East that is entirely okay with him. His simple justification is that “we need them”.
This also is the view of most of the people. They don’t really want to know the truth. They like to pretend that all of the murder, suffering, lives destroyed, and looting of lesser nations is a result of crimes against them by the victim nations. Having the most military power on the block is a green light to them simply to use it. In fact, if they are not sociopaths themselves like all of their “leaders”, they hate truthers for trying to awaken their consciences to oppose the evils of their governments. As for the sociopath power elites, they hate and want to eliminate truthers simply because most people still do have consciences to awaken.
So where is Pope Francis in all of this – that globalist, moral-relativist, Church-deconstructing, Marxist pawn inserted into the papacy with tons of Masonic and money-power blackmail for the obvious purpose of helping to usher in the New World Order globalist solutions for the problems they have engineered? Strangely, no religious leader of any major Christian denomination is apt to call any of these wars as “unjust”, and the real perpetrators “evil”. This means they have abandoned Christianity and are essentially saying there are no restraints from the laws of God over the human exercise of power. Is it not so very strange that during Covid, all of “leaders” of our hallowed institutions completely failed even to speak out and to try and protect us. All of our elected representatives, our judiciaries, the media, and all heads of our major institutions were simply a part of it. They all betrayed the people they were there to represent and to protect. With all the hype and BS for a WWIII, if it were to come true, they would continue to be inert and entirely useless as they are with any major evil in the world, including even child trafficking.
@ Fred B;
your quote ..” no religious leader of any major Christian denomination is apt to call any of these wars as “unjust”, and the real perpetrators “evil”.
See the following link re Archbishop Vigano’s excommunication from the Vatican for doing exactly that.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/exclusive-archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-summoned-vatican-be/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=exclusive-archbishop-carlo-maria-vigano-summoned-vatican-be
Netanyahu is insane. Let him attack Hezbollah, so that Israel will be destroyed! Israel needs a major population reduction, either by death or fleeing Palestine to escape being killed. Israelis will move into the Jew-ruled western states, further polluting them and assisting in their crash, leaving the Jew-Ruled west to rot.
marco still doesn’t realize that Russia is a Jew ruled State too..
Oh, ol’ Gen. Charlie Brown, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff…really, Charlie f*cking Brown? Anyhoo, Gen. Charlie Brown and all of the “Joint Chiefs” of the Jewnited States have violated their oaths from day one and continue to do so on a daily basis. The cuntry has been subverted, has hordes of Orcs invading across the border every f*cking day, and the cartel in Washingstein commits treason regularly, but ol’ Charlie Brown and his fellow costumed buffoons don’t do jack shit except cash their big fat paychecks and worry about the terrorist enclave of Israhell. They all deserve to be dragged through the streets by their ankles then publicly executed.
Israhell should have been carpet-bombed, Dresden style, the day after their attack on the USS Liberty, then nuked into a smouldering, glowing wasteland on September 12, 2001 for the shit they pulled the day before.
These Brown statements suggest the US is getting shakey. Pinning Iran is the go to for we ain’t got the goods, yes we got the lives to waste but we ain’t got the goods. Of course Iran will aid the Hez, der.
Israel defence systems rely mainly on the patriot missiles (Ra Ra) that are limited in number and cannot be mass produced. These statements show the administration is thinking twice something they rarely do.
Jets? well sure but the Hez is underground and has some air defence so this isn’t going to be a walk over.
Brown would be better off pom pom twirling because that’s all he’s got.
As for African defence ministers they’d sooner buy Russian.