Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Israel’s threats to expand the war into Lebanon, a Polish battle over control of state media, and U.S.-Mexico meetings on migration.

Israel Warns Hezbollah, Lebanon Over Border Fighting

Israel has warned that it will act to remove Hezbollah from the Lebanese border should the group’s attacks continue. Israeli Minister without portfolio Benny Gantz said “[t]he situation on Israel’s northern border demands change,” and that “[t]he stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out.”

“If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] will do it,” Gantz said.

Cross-border attacks have been ongoing, and escalating, since Oct. 8, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel. Gantz’s threats—to say nothing of the fighting itself—have fed concerns that Israel’s retaliatory war on the Gaza Strip could turn into a regional conflict.

Lebanese authorities have reported more than a dozen casualties from cross-border fighting, and three people were killed by an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon this week. Since the start of the war, three Lebanese journalists have also been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Four Israeli civilians and eight Israeli soldiers have been killed so far in these clashes, and Israel has restricted civilians from entering the area up to 2.5 miles from the border with Lebanon. Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, head of the IDF’s northern command, said his country’s northern forces were “in a state of very high readiness.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned earlier this month that Israel would “single-handedly turn Beirut and South Lebanon, not far from here, into Gaza and Khan Younis [Gaza’s second-largest city]” if Hezbollah launched an all-out war against Israel. Hezbollah is an Iran-supported militant organization that the United States and Israel have designated as a terrorist organization. Netanyahu also recently vowed that the war in Gaza would continue for months; most Israelis—about 76 percent, in a recent poll—want him to resign.

But some have wondered whether Israel has the strategic ability to handle a broader war, with one former Israeli national security advisor telling the New York Times that Israel’s plan is “vague.” Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron  said, “I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is. The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”

Fighting in Gaza continues, and Israel has expanded its ground campaign into urban refugee camps in central Gaza. International warnings are growing around not just the rising death toll from bombardment and Israel’s ground campaign, but also the peril of deteriorating daily living conditions: According to Thomas White, the Gaza director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, every day is a struggle for finding food at water. The U.N. agency has said that 40 percent of Gaza is at risk of famine.

Today’s Most Read

• No, Putin Is Not One of the Year’s ‘Winners’ by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian
• America Is a Heartbeat Away From a War It Could Lose by A. Wess Mitchell
• The Trouble With a Cease-Fire by Raphael S. Cohen

What We’re Following

Polish president, state government fight over state media. The new Polish government’s push to reform state media after eight years of populist Law and Justice Party rule is facing resistance. Critics of the party said that an overhaul was necessary, and that Polish state media had served as little more than a mouthpiece for the government. But Polish President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice ally, vetoed the government’s public media budget last week.

In response, the new culture minister, Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz, announced, “Due to the decision of the President of the Republic of Poland to suspend financing of public media, I decided to put into liquidation the [state-run media] companies Telewizja Polska SA, Polskie Radio SA and Polska Agencja Prasowa SA.” The liquidation process is intended to protect the organizations while they’re deprived of funding, and will, according the government, allow the country to go ahead with the restructuring by appointing liquidators.

Duda’s office said the new culture minister was acting like “a typical aggressor,” while Law and Justice lawmaker Joanna Lichocka said on social media that “Tusk’s government is destroying the Polish media.”

Blinken, AMLO discuss migration. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met to discuss border crossings—and, in particular, how to curb them. Blinken said on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, that the two discussed “shared challenges,” including “unprecedented irregular migration flows.” López Obrador, for his part, posted that both sides came to “important agreements,” though they were light on details.

A senior Biden official was quoted by the AFP as saying, “We were really impressed by some of the new actions that Mexico is taking, and we have seen in recent days a pretty significant reduction in border crossings.” Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena told U.S. and Mexican officials that negotiations focused on economic conditions and the “structural causes of migration.”

Two million people were apprehended at the U.S. southern border in both the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, and Blinken’s Mexico City meeting coincided with a joint virtual press conference held by the mayors of New York City, Denver, and Chicago to address what they have described as a “crisis” of migration in their cities. On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order that says bus charter companies must give 32 hours of warning before migrant arrivals in the city. It also limits the hours that the buses can arrive.

Prague gunman confesses more killings. The Czech university student who carried out a mass shooting at Charles University in Prague last week confessed to two additional earlier murders. According to police, the 24-year-old had left a letter at this home in which he confessed to a previous killing of an infant and a father in a forest near the outskirts of Prague. Their bodies were discovered with gunshot wounds in mid-December. He is now believed to be responsible for 17 murders. The city’s police chief, Martin Vondrasek, described the university shooting as “well-thought out, a horrible act.” It is believed to be the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.

Odds and Ends

Viva, Las Vegas! The number of couples tying the knot in Las Vegas this New Year’s Eve could be the most ever. That’s because this New Year’s Eve is a special date: Dec. 31, 2023, can also be written as 12/31/23, which is effectively one-two-three, one-two-three, making it what those in the Las Vegas wedding industry call a specialty date. Marry a specialty date with a holiday, and you get—well, many other marriages. The previous record-holder is July 7, 2007, when 4,492 couples were wed in the city. We do not know how many of them are still married.