Report: US worries Netanyahu will launch war in Lebanon to save his political career

Officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration worry that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may launch a full-on war against the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon to stabilize his domestic standing and salvage his teetering political career, the Washington Post reports.

Netanyahu has dipped in opinion polls since the war began, with the public evidently attributing to him a significant portion of the blame for the failures that enabled Hamas’s October 7 massacres.

Multiple senior Israeli leaders have repeatedly said Hezbollah must be driven away from the Israel-Lebanon border, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006, vowing that if this isn’t achieved via diplomacy, it will be achieved militarily.

The Post cites over a dozen unnamed Biden administration officials and diplomats in its report, which says the US has dispatched senior envoys — presumably including Amos Hochstein and Secretary of State Antony Blinken — to Israel in order to prevent a full-blown war between the Jewish state and Iran-backed Hezbollah.

The report says part of tensions between Jerusalem and Washington on the matter is due to the IDF having allegedly hit posts belonging to the US-backed Lebanese Armed Forces at least 34 times since October 7.

An Israeli official tells the US outlet that the country doesn’t deliberately target Lebanese army positions.