The longer the violence goes on the greater the chance of another front opening. Already we are seeing daily clashes between Hezbollah and Israel on Lebanon’s southern border.
Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Buhabib, is warning the present situation is like “adding fuel to the fire”. America is using back channels to try to take the sting out of the crisis but it is not viewed in much of the region as an honest broker. As a steadfast ally of Israel, it has skin in the game.
Its failure to really address for decades an equitable solution for the Palestinians make its words sound hollow on the Arab street.
Listen to a protestor I met outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut. His name is Wissam.
"We are demonstrating here in support of the people in Gaza. Because of the massacres carried out by the Zionist enemies with the full support of the United States.
"The demonstrations may escalate due to the massacres carried out by Israel, the latest of which is the bombing of children and women in a hospital.
"America’s support to Israel is clear after US President Joe Biden adopted the Israeli scenario that Hamas was the one that bombed the hospital.”
He was barely twenty but what struck me most was that the sentiments he conveyed, if you stripped them of the references to current events, could have been voiced by another Arab youth 10, 20, 30 years ago or even further back.
It’s easy to talk of causes in the present and forget that what drives the conflict we’re seeing now is the same dynamic it’s been for many, many years.
Its failure to really address for decades an equitable solution for the Palestinians make its words sound hollow on the Arab street. Unless that is addressed there will never be a resolution. Now, in the immediate, it’s hard to see a way out of this crisis.
Alex Rossi is Sky News's International Correspondent in Beirut. Watch Sky News on Freeview channel 233
