Eleven people were injured yesterday when explosive-laden drones launched by Hizballah attacked a town near the Israel-Lebanon border. This was but one of dozens of Hizballah strikes on the region, which have sparked forest fires and set large swaths of northern Israel ablaze. On Sunday, a drone hit Nahariya, a northern city just far enough from the border to have been spared bombardment until now. The war cabinet and IDF brass are currently debating how to respond. Matti Friedman, whose parents live in Nahariya, reports:

My parents are lucky to still be in their homes. North of their town, and along the entire length of the Israel-Lebanon border, all civilians—about 70,000 people—have been evacuated under fire from the Iranian-backed Shiite group north of the border. Legendary frontier kibbutzim where pioneers set Israel’s border eight decades ago, like Hanita and Manara, have been empty, unthinkably, for eight months. The town of Kiryat Shmona is deserted. Metulah, a community established by Jews in 1896, is a battered ghost town.

With Israeli and international focus on the fighting in Gaza, and without sending in a single soldier, Hizballah has successfully moved Israel’s northern border a few miles south. Israel’s military has been picking off Hizballah fighters and commanders with air strikes, but this hasn’t calmed things down, and no one knows when Israelis who live in the north will be able to return home.

Hizballah has far more rockets than Hamas and is better trained. While never saying so explicitly, Israel can’t conduct significant campaigns on the two fronts simultaneously, so the situation along the border has been allowed to continue inconclusively. But this can’t go on indefinitely, and an Israeli move now seems closer than ever. When this happens, Gaza moves to the back burner and Lebanon comes to the front.

In a momentous meeting with the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh, President Trump announced that he is lifting sanctions on the beleaguered and war-torn country. On the one hand, Sharaa is an alumnus of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, who came to power as commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which itself began life as al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot; he also seems to enjoy the support of Qatar. On the other hand, he overthrew the Assad regime—a feat made possible by the battering Israel delivered to Hizballah—greatly improving Jerusalem’s strategic position, and ending one of the world’s most atrocious and brutal tyrannies. President Trump also announced that he hopes Syria will join the Abraham Accords.

This analysis by Eran Lerman was published a few days ago, and in some respects is already out of date, but more than anything else I’ve read it helps to make sense of Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis Syria.

Israel’s primary security interest lies in defending against worst-case scenarios, particularly the potential collapse of the Syrian state or its transformation into an actively hostile force backed by a significant Turkish presence (considering that the Turkish military is the second largest in NATO) with all that this would imply. Hence the need to bolster the new buffer zone—not for territorial gain, but as a vital shield and guarantee against dangerous developments. Continued airstrikes aimed at diminishing the residual components of strategic military capabilities inherited from the Assad regime are essential.

At the same time, there is a need to create conditions that would enable those in Damascus who wish to reject the reduction of their once-proud country into a Turkish satrapy. Sharaa’s efforts to establish his legitimacy, including his visit to Paris and outreach to the U.S., other European nations, and key Gulf countries, may generate positive leverage in this regard. Israel’s role is to demonstrate through daily actions the severe costs of acceding to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions and accepting Turkish hegemony.

Israel should also assist those in Syria (and beyond: this may have an effect in Lebanon as well) who look to it as a strategic anchor in the region. The Druze in Syria—backed by their brethren in Israel—have openly expressed this expectation, breaking decades of loyalty to the central power in Damascus over their obligation to their kith and kin.