The sound of the muezzin enveloped the valley of Ayta ash Shab. As the Dhur Azan prayer resounded in the Shiite village on Lebanon's southern border, at around midday on Saturday, October 21, phones began to buzz. Hezbollah had just attacked the Israeli village of Baram from its position 10 kilometers to the east. The attack marked the end of a morning of calm in the border villages along the Blue Line. A new day of fighting began between the Lebanese Shiite movement and the Israeli army along the 80-kilometer demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel.

On the heights of the town, local journalists, supporters of the Party of God, pointed their cameras toward the border in the hopes of capturing images of artillery fire. Overhead, the sound of Israeli drones intensified. The sound of a fighter plane ripped through the sky. On the hill opposite them, fighters from Hezbollah and Palestinian factions stood ready, out of sight. From their military positions along a stony path that wound its way along the ridge, the view was unobstructed over the separation wall built by Israel below.

It was from this hilly region that Hezbollah fighters launched an attack on an Israeli patrol on July 12, 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two others. A month-long war ensued, devastating Lebanon and leaving 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis dead. After 17 years of almost uninterrupted calm, the factions aligned with Iran in the "Islamic resistance" axis. They rekindled this front "in solidarity" with Hamas and the population of Gaza, the latter of which has been caught in a deluge of Israeli fire after the massacres committed by the Islamic resistance movement on October 7. To loosen the stranglehold on the enclave, they have harassed the Israeli army from Lebanon.

Attacks gain in intensity

Initially sporadic, Hezbollah's rocket and guided missile attacks and incursions into enemy territory have grown in intensity by the day. The retaliation by Israeli planes, drones and tanks has become all the more stinging. The balance of deterrence established between the two belligerents since 2006 is threatened a little more each day. On the Lebanese side, 36 people have already died, including 24 Hezbollah fighters and civilians, including a Reuters journalist. The Israeli army reported four dead: three soldiers and one civilian.

The specter of a second front between Hezbollah and Israel is on everyone's mind. A war with the Party of God, more powerful than Hamas, with its proclaimed 100,000 fighters – thousands of them battle-hardened in Syria – and tens of thousands of rockets and missiles, would drag Lebanon, and the region, into a destructive conflict. Washington and Paris have warned Iran against a regional flare-up. "We say to those who contact us: 'Stop the [Israeli] aggression so that its repercussions and the possibility of expansion cease,'" Hezbollah's number two, Naim Kassem, retorted on Saturday, stressing that his movement was already "in the thick of the battle."

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