UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix warned against making assumptions about how regional actors will behave…reports Asian Lite News
A broader regional war in the Middle East where conflict already rages between Hamas and Israel remains a “significant risk,” the head of the UN peacekeeping force warned Friday.
Speaking to reporters in Brussels, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix warned against making assumptions about how regional actors will behave.
“The perception could exist that there are certain rules that neither parties want to trespass and therefore that we are in a situation that is more stable than one could think,” Lacroix said on the sidelines of an EU defense ministers’ meeting.
“There is still a very significant risk of escalation at the regional level,” he said, adding: “We are still very much in a very, very dangerous type of situation.”
Tensions have risen since the October start of Israel’s war in Gaza, with Hezbollah supporting the Palestinian armed group Hamas with operations in southern Lebanon, including daily exchanges of fire with Israeli troops.
Hundreds of Hezbollah fighters have been killed in cross-border fighting, while around 100,000 people on both sides of the border have been displaced.
Lacroix warned of the risk of an “unintended” escalation or a “misunderstanding.”
“One of the risks, in particular in southern Lebanon, is both parties not exactly understanding where the other is in terms of calculus,” he said.
On Sunday, Hezbollah carried out a major drone and rocket attack against Israel, in retaliation for the death of one of its military leaders, Fuad Shukr, killed in an Israeli strike near Beirut on July 30.
In response, Israel launched air strikes into Lebanon the same day.
Amid escalating tensions, the UN Security Council extended the mandate of the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon — numbering around 10,000 — for a year.
The war in Gaza erupted after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 40,602 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel this week also pressed a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank, despite UN concerns it is “fueling an already explosive situation.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s army on Saturday announced the first death of a soldier during its ongoing raid in the occupied West Bank that began four days ago.
An army statement said 20-year-old Elkana Navon “fell during operational activity” on Saturday and that another soldier was “severely injured” in the same incident, without providing details.
Since Wednesday at least 22 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army, most of them militants, in simultaneous raids in several cities in the northern West Bank.
Since Friday, soldiers have concentrated their operations on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp, long a bastion of Palestinian armed groups fighting against Israel.
Violence has surged in the West Bank since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the war in the Gaza Strip.
The United Nations said on Wednesday that at least 637 Palestinians had been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war began.
Twenty Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during army operations over the same period, according to Israeli official figures.
During a visit to Jenin on Saturday, Israeli army chief of staff Herzi Halevi said Israeli forces “have no intention of letting terrorism (in the West Bank) raise its head” to threaten Israel.
“Therefore the initiative is to go from city to city, refugee camp to refugee camp, with excellent intelligence, with very good operational capabilities, with a very strong air intelligence envelope… We will protect the citizens of Israel just like that.”
Of the 22 Palestinians reported dead since Wednesday, Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad have said at least 14 were members of their armed wings.
Earlier on Saturday, Hamas issued a statement saying one of its fighters carried out an “ambush” using “a highly explosive device” in the Jenin refugee camp “which led to the deaths and injuries of members of the advancing (Israeli) force.”
2 dead in West Bank ‘shooting attack’
Israel’s medical emergency service said a “shooting attack” Sunday in the occupied West Bank killed two people and critically wounded another, as violence surges in the Palestinian territory days into major Israeli raids.
Emergency service provider Magen David Adom said its paramedics had “pronounced dead a male and a female, both approximately 30 years old, and are evacuating a man in his 50s, in critical condition” from the scene of the attack east of Tarqumiya checkpoint near the city of Hebron.
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