The British military is standing by to evacuate UK citizens from the Middle East amid concerns that a war between Israel and Hezbollah is imminent. Foreign nationals have been urged to leave the area as the Iran-backed terror group vows revenge for the death of Hezbollah’s military chief Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
The UK, US, France, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and Turkey are among the nations who have urged their citizens to leave as tensions grow, particularly since the killing of 12 Israeli children by an airstrike that Israel blamed on Hezbollah in July. The incident prompted tit-for-tat strikes between the Islamist militants and the Israeli military, including a drone strike at a military barracks in Ayelet HaShahar, northern Israel, on August 4. Hezbollah has also launched rockets at the Israeli town of Beit Hillel, while Israel targeted sites in southern Lebanon.
In a separate incident, a Palestinian from the West Bank launched a knife attack in the Israeli city of Holon, killing two people before Israeli forces fatally shot him. Meanwhile, the war in Gaza rages on, and on August 4, the terror group Hamas claimed that an Israeli strike on a hospital killed five people.
Hezbollah has been launching rockets at Israel for years and increased these when Israel went to war with Hamas last October. The group came to prominence during the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and rose to become the dominant Shiite terror group with the support of the world’s leading Shia Muslim state, Iran.
In the 1980s, Hezbollah produced a manifesto in which it pledged allegiance to Iran and echoed its intention to wipe Israel from the global map. In internal Lebanese politics, the militant organization plays a high-profile part, and its members usually occupy seats in the country’s legislature and government. Separately, it maintains its status as a prominent military force. Some analysts say its political role is “a means to maintain its independent military status.”
Hezbollah’s leader is Hassan Nasrallah, who rose to the top in the 1990s at age 32. He is seen as staunchly anti-Western and one of Israel’s fiercest critics.
