Israel launches assault on Khan Younis after previously claiming it destroyed Hamas there

Daniel Byman:

So the Israeli military has to worry about three different wars. First, of course, is the war on Gaza, and it’s using many munitions for that.

My sense is that it does have enough munitions to continue that on a day-to-day basis, but that is costing a lot of Israel’s ammunition stocks. But Israel also has two other wars. One is the limited war that’s going on across the border with Lebanon, where it’s fighting the Lebanese Hezbollah.

Here, we have seen literally thousands of attacks across the border, and well over 100 people have died on the Lebanese side, over a dozen Israelis. And this conflict is not only something that’s ongoing, but Israel fears it can become a full-bore conflict.

And, if so, it would dwarf what we have seen in Gaza. Hezbollah is a much more formidable force than Hamas, and the Israeli military would need a lot of munitions for this, and it wants to keep some in reserve for that possibility.

And the last, as we saw in April, is an open shooting war with Iran. And when this happened in April, Israel used its missile defense forces and really did only a very limited retaliation against Iran itself. But the possibility that Iran could become directly involved in a much bigger conflict is also something that the Israeli military has to worry about.