Smoke rises above Lebanon, following an Israeli strike, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel on May 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Official media in Lebanon said an Israeli strike on May 5 on a southern village killed four family members, with Hezbollah announcing retaliatory attacks, in the latest cross-border violence since the Gaza war erupted.

Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group have exchanged regular cross-border fire since Palestinian militant group Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip.

Fighting has intensified in recent weeks, with Hamas ally Hezbollah stepping up its attacks on northern Israel, and the Israeli military striking deeper into Lebanese territory.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said Sunday’s strike in Mais al-Jabal killed “four people from a single family”, reporting that the raid was carried out by Israeli aircraft.

It identified the dead as a man, a woman and their children aged 12 and 21, and said two other people were wounded.

A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed the strike killed “four civilians”.

Mais al-Jabal municipality chief Abdelmoneim Shukair had earlier told AFP that three people were killed, saying they were a couple and their son.

The Israeli military said in a statement later Sunday that “this morning… fighter jets struck a military site in the area of Mais al-Jabal”, without providing further details.

More retaliatory fire

Hezbollah in a statement said it fired “dozens of Katyusha and Falaq rockets” at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel “in response to the horrific crime that the Israeli enemy committed in Mais al-Jabal”.

It later said it fired dozens more Katyusha rockets across the border “as part of the response” to the Mais al-Jabal strike, and claimed a string of other attacks on northern Israel, some in stated retaliation to the raid.

The Israeli army said in the statement that “approximately 40 launches were identified crossing from Lebanon… a number of which were intercepted.”

“No injuries were reported,” it said, adding the army “struck the sources of the fire”.

It also said “fighter jets struck Hezbollah military structures and terrorist infrastructure” in several areas of southern Lebanon.

Lebanon’s NNA reported Israeli strikes on various locations in the country’s south.

Hezbollah has repeatedly declared that only a ceasefire in Gaza will end its attacks on Israel, which it says are in support of Gazans and Hamas.

Both the United States and France have made diplomatic efforts to calm tensions on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

In Lebanon, at least 390 people have been killed in nearly seven months of cross-border violence, mostly militants but also more than 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israel says 11 soldiers and nine civilians have been killed on its side of the border.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides.

A drone view of the remains of a ballistic missile, as it lies in the desert following a massive missile and drone attack by Iran on Israel
| Photo Credit: YAIR PALTI

West Asia supplies the most extractive resources for the world’s energy consumption, which makes peace an imperative in the region. Yet tensions are escalating in the region on account of the Israel-Gaza conflict, the hostilities between Iran and Israel, and the attacks and counter-attacks between Israel and Iran-backed militias from Lebanon and Yemen.

Apart from this, the region has also become one of the most heavily militarised in the world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers 2023’, four of the top 10 largest importers of arms last year were from West Asia, with the U.S. being the main supplier (Table 1).

All this has resulted in West Asia becoming a powder keg.

Table 1 | The table lists the top suppliers of arms to West Asian countries. Figures in %.

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Crises in the region

Israel’s shadow war with Tehran underwent a dramatic escalation recently. Iran launched its first-ever full-scale military attack against Israel on April 14 in retaliation to the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s attack on April 1 on an Iranian compound in Syria in which General Mohammed Reza Zehadi, the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed.

Also read: A new low: On Israel’s Gaza war and the U.S. response

Israel has been continuing its attacks on the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7 Hamas attack which led to the death of 1,139 people. Nearly 34,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. The conflict persists despite the international community urging for an immediate ceasefire. The 10-month-long Gaza war and the amping up of Iran-Israel hostilities has caused concern among international actors amid existing tensions such as the unresolved Yemeni civil war, the Lebanese political crisis, the 14-year-long Syrian civil war, and the Turkey-Cyprus conflict, among others.

Chart 2 | The chart shows region-wise military expenditure as a share of their GDP.

Amid these crises, West Asia today accounts for almost 30% of the global arms imports and spends the most on the military among all other regions in the world. In the case of military expenditure as a share of the GDP, West Asia and North Africa have been consistently leading for over three decades now, though the share has come down from the peak of over 10% of GDP, reported in the 1990s. West Asia spent 4.6% of its GDP in 2020 on the military, compared with 3.3% in North America.

Share of GDP

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the oil and natural gas rich nation-states, have consistently spent over 5% of their GDP on defence in recent years, the highest among countries in this region. Jordan, Oman, Kuwait and Israel have also spent close to 5% of their GDP on their militaries in the last decade.

Chart 3 | The chart shows the military expenditure as a share of GDP for individual countries in the West Asian region.

Though Saudi Arabia and Oman’s shares are on a decreasing trend, they continue to lead others in the world in this measure.

Chart 4 | The chart shows the share of labour force employed in the armed forces.

This is also the region where the share of the labour force employed in the armed forces is the highest. Chart 4 shows that 2.5% of the labour force is engaged in the military in the West Asian and North African region, compared with only 1.2% in Europe and Central Asia.

The consistent demand for arms can be attributed to the growing instability in the region fuelled by domestic insurgencies, transnational terrorist attacks, unstable regional boundaries, and, in some cases, foreign policies and the need to project “hard power”.

The hangover of the ‘Arab Spring’ that led to a lot of churning and resulted in the aforementioned issues has also contributed to the increased militarisation.

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