A moment later, a deafening blast—“as if the whole world exploded”—ripped through the garden outside Elmakias’s home, near the northern Israeli suburb of Nahariya. Amid the shrieks of his wife and three children, the family tumbled together to the floor. The blast, a rocket launched by the Lebanese Islamist group Hizbullah, shattered light bulbs and windows and ripped doors off their hinges. Elmakias tried to comfort his three children, stroking the head of his 6-year-old daughter, Liran. But her hair was sprinkled with glass shards. Now, “Nahariya is a ghost town,” Elmakias says, his hands still shaking as he recalls the incident. “I feel like things will never be the same again.”
Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese—and not a few worried American policymakers—share the same fear. For months tensions had been rising in the Middle East, as Israel struggled to cope with an increasingly intransigent Hamas-led Palestinian government and a newly assertive Hizbullah. After Hamas militants kidnapped an Israeli soldier three weeks ago, Israel responded with punishing air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip. The crisis was acute—but it also seemed largely confined to the Palestinian territories. Yet after Hizbullah snatched two more soldiers from the northern border earlier this week in a copycat attack, Israeli warplanes hammered at Beirut from the air, bombing the international airport and other targets in Hizbullah-controlled regions. Hizbullah responded by lobbing more than 100 rockets into northern Israeli villages like Nahariya, killing two and wounding more than 50. In Lebanon, Israeli bombs have killed at least 61, and wounded three times that many.
Some American policymakers, including President Bush, expressed their worries that the attacks and reprisals could ignite a wider regional conflict. But to Israeli officials, the American administration seemed to be sending mixed signals about the strikes. “We’re getting both [messages],” says a senior Israeli security official, who did not want to be identified discussing ongoing operations. “We’re getting support. And we’re getting requests to tone [it] down. But no pressure at this point.” Israeli officials say that could give them a freer hand. But they also acknowledge that without third-party intervention, Israel and Lebanon will be unlikely to solve the crisis on their own. “Under a different administration, you’d probably see shuttle diplomacy to a higher degree,” says the Israeli official. But this time, “the U.S. is too hung up in different places.”
Could some of those “different places”—Middle East flashpoints from Tehran to Damascus—also find themselves targets of Israeli military raids? The Israeli security official says he doubts Israel will extend the campaign to Syria, which harbors Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshaal. “I don’t think anybody would exclude it,” says the official. But at the moment, he believes it would take a deliberate provocation on the part of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or his security chiefs, something Israeli policymakers see as unlikely.
Still, other Israeli officials insist that Iran’s Islamist government will need to be dealt with if the crisis is ever to be fully resolved. “Hizbullah is not a Lebanese organization,” says retired general Ephraim Sneh, a hawkish member of Israel’s Labor Party. “It’s a proxy for Iran.” Sneh says Iran has supplied some 13,000 rockets to the radical Islamists, shipping thousands of Katyusha rockets and hundreds of longer-range Fagr missiles to Hizbullah by truck via Damascus. “[Hizbullah leader Hassan] Nasrallah has never carried out an operation on this scale without his [Iranian] masters,” Sneh insists.
In Gaza, Palestinians jubilantly cheered the Hizbullah attacks. Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas official in Gaza City, told NEWSWEEK that although his group didn’t coordinate its attacks ahead of time with Hizbullah, Hamas welcomed the help. Before, “we felt we were alone,” Hamad said, reclining in his office chair. “The world was watching what was happening in Gaza without doing anything.” A wider crisis “might push the world to move,” Hamad insists.
But Hamad also knows that renewed fighting could backfire for Hamas. Already some high-profile cabinet ministers have gone into hiding. (Hamas legislators told NEWSWEEK that they were having trouble getting in touch with Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar , who fled his house after Israeli airstrikes destroyed his office.) Hamad says he’s carefully watching public opinion among what he calls the “normal people”—the more moderate publics in Arab-world capitals like Amman and Cairo. He hopes the crisis might push them to rally around the radicals.
Yet the forces that give Hamad comfort are the same ones that stoke the Elmakias family’s fears. Back in Nahariya, Silvan waits for a reprieve. Yesterday he sent his wife and children for cover in the port city of Haifa, but the Hizbullah rockets fell even there last night. Daughter Liran just sits staring at the television, refusing to eat or drink. For now, Silvan can only hope that one day soon all parties will come to their senses so he and his family can get back to what was once their normal life.
