Israel is making the case for war, in public, against Lebanon

Analysis by Sam Kiley, CNN
Updated 1930 GMT (0330 HKT) August 30, 2019

Jerusalem (CNN) — Israel's military went on a propaganda offensive against Iran and Hezbollah using social media to drastically increase tensions with neighboring Lebanon hours after Benjamin Netanyahu warned the nation's enemies, in Arabic, to "watch it."

The Israeli prime minister was on the campaign trail ahead of elections scheduled for September 17. But the barrage of agitprop by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) represented a dramatic shift towards a warning of outright war.

The casus belli, Israel says, is Iran's efforts to modernize Hezbollah's Lebanon-based arsenal of what Israel says is more than 100,000 rockets into precision-guided missiles.

Since the ill-fated Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, during which the IDF lost nearly 120 troops and scores of civilians and about 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 Lebanese soldiers and police died, there's been an understanding between the two enemies that neither would do anything that could spark a return to all-out conflict. Both sides have, until now anyway, recognized a degree of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in that scenario.

But Israel has now named three senior Iranian officers, two brigadier generals and a colonel, whom the IDF said were in charge of the missile program for Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also pointedly observed that the leader of the group, the Iranian Quds Force, was in the country "with his family."

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