Mideast contagion risk increases

The risk of Israel's war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza spreading into the wider Middle East region appeared to step up a notch at the weekend with Jerusalem saying it is preparing for fighting on its northern border with Lebanon.

The move, announced by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), came after Israel pinned a 27 July rocket attack that killed 12 people in the Golan Heights on Lebanon-based Hezbollah — like Hamas, an Iran-backed group. The IDF said it is "greatly increasing its readiness for the next stage of fighting in the north." The White House also blamed Hezbollah for the strike, saying its was "their rocket, and launched from an area they control."

Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire almost daily since 8 October last year, a day after Hamas first attacked Israel. Those skirmishes had mostly targeted military sites, but the weekend strike was by far the deadliest on civilians inside Israeli territory.

The prospect of violence spreading in the Middle East has been a concern, not least in Washington, since the war began between Hamas and Israel. On 13 April, Iran attacked Israel directly for the first time and Israel retaliated five days later. The Yemen-based Houthi militant group launched a campaign of targeting commercial vessels in the Red Sea in what it said was a direct response to Israel's actions in Gaza, and recently directly hit central Tel Aviv with a drone.

International crude markets did not react to the weekend's events. Ice Brent front-month crude was mostly unchanged today.

Separately, Turkish President Erdogan Recep Tayyip Erdogan on 28 July increased his rhetoric against Israel, hinting at intervention in the Gaza conflict. This may put in doubt Ankara's involvement in any multinational post-war force in Gaza, a "day after" scenario the UAE and the US are attempting to work on.

"We must be very strong so that Israel can't do these things to Palestine," Erdogan said in a televised speech in his hometown of Rize, where he enjoys overwhelming support.

"Just as we entered Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we might do the same to them," he said. "There is nothing we cannot do. Only we must be strong."

Erdogan has adopted a more aggressive stance towards Israel since his AKP party's poor showing at municipal elections in March, with the Palestinian struggle for statehood being a key cause for his conservative Muslim support base.

His comments were non-specific as to the nature of any potential Turkish involvement in Palestinian territories. In Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, Ankara provided military hardware — especially unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — and advisors that helped shape outcomes of both conflicts.

Israel's foreign minister Israel Katz said Erdogan was following "in the footsteps of Saddam Hussein" with threats to attack Israel. "Just let him remember what happened there and how it ended," he said on X.

US secretary of state Anthony Blinken on 28 July reiterated Washington's desire to prevent the conflict from escalating.

"We don't want to see it spread," he said in Japan. "The best way to do that in a sustained way is to get the ceasefire in Gaza."

By Bachar Halabi