The escalation that long felt inevitable arrived in a blaze of cross-border attacks over the weekend, but a Middle East on edge woke Monday having escaped all-out war — for now at least.
The intense exchange between Israel and Hezbollah followed weeks of threats that stoked fears of a wider regional conflict.
And on Sunday the U.S. ally launched what it said were pre-emptive strikes on southern Lebanon after detecting preparations for a “large-scale” attack by the Iran-backed militant group.
Soon after, Hezbollah aimed hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel and claimed to have hit a military intelligence base near Tel Aviv — revenge, it said, for the assassination of a senior commander last month in Beirut.
It was the heaviest fire the two sides have traded in ten months of simmering conflict.
But both Israel and Hezbollah quickly signaled they were happy to leave things there, for now. Tehran, reiterating its own vow of “definitive” retaliation against Israel, touted the Hezbollah attacks as a success. And Washington voiced continued hope for efforts to secure a cease-fire in Gaza.
“The exchange of fire alongside the Israeli-Lebanese border … and the post-strike messages from both Israel and Hezbollah seemingly indicate neither is interested in an all-out war,” Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and negotiator, said in an analysis shared with NBC News on Sunday.
He said the round of violence could bring some “calm to the region” and “bring an end to the anxious period of waiting for rounds of retaliatory strikes that could very well have led to an all-out war.”
The escalation came amid ongoing talks in Egypt’s capital, Cairo, to negotiate a deal between Israel and Hamas that would end the fighting in Gaza and secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in the Palestinian enclave.
The high-level talks in Cairo ended on Sunday without any final agreement, though they’re expected to continue at lower levels over the coming days in an effort to close remaining gaps in the negotiations, a U.S. official told NBC News. The talks “have been constructive and were conducted in a spirit on all sides to reach a final and implementable agreement,” the official said.