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.

Concluded in 1979, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty ended nearly 30 years of intermittent warfare, and proved one of the most enduring and beneficial products of Middle East diplomacy. But Egypt may not have been upholding its end of the bargain, write Jonathan Schanzer and Mariam Wahba:

Article III, subsection two of the peace agreement’s preamble explicitly requires both parties “to ensure that that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory.” This clause also mandates both parties to hold accountable any perpetrators of such acts.

Recent Israeli operations along the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land bordering Egypt and Gaza, have uncovered multiple tunnels and access points used by Hamas—some in plain sight of Egyptian guard towers. While it could be argued that Egypt has lacked the capacity to tackle this problem, it is equally plausible that it lacks the will. Either way, it’s a serious problem.

Was Egypt motivated by money, amidst a steep and protracted economic decline in recent years? Did Cairo get paid off by Hamas, or its wealthy patron, Qatar? Did the Iranians play a role? Was Egypt threatened with violence and unrest by the Sinai’s Bedouin Union of Tribes, who are the primary profiteers of smuggling, if it did not allow the tunnels to operate? Or did the Sisi regime take part in this operation because of an ideological hatred of Israel?