WASHINGTON – The Biden administration was not informed of Israel’s decision to launch barrage of airstrikes in Lebanon’s capital on Friday, Pentagon officials said.
Israeli warplanes completely destroyed six high-rise apartment buildings in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh on Friday in an attempt to kill Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah has confirmed Nasrallah’s death. The strikes were initially reported to have killed at least six people and wounded 91 others, Lebanon’s health ministry said, but the death toll is likely to rise.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, around 11 a.m. on Friday morning while Austin was on a return flight to Washington after a diplomatic visit to the UK.
By the time the two defense chiefs spoke, the Israeli air raids in Lebanon were already underway, Pentagon officials said.
During their conversation, Gallant informed Austin that Nasrallah was the target of the strikes. Austin, according to a person familiar with the call, became angry.
Just a day prior, the US defense chief publicly called on Israel and Hezbollah to “choose a different path” and allow diplomacy to resolve the conflict, which has killed more than 700 people in Lebanon already this week and displaced more than 200,000 others since the fighting began last year.
Days after posptponing trip
Israel’s strikes occurred just days after Austin had been scheduled to stop in Israel for meetings with top defense officials. But the trip was postponed after Israeli intelligence detonated thousands of mobile pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon last week.
“The United States was not involved in Israel’s operation,” the Pentagon chief affirmed to reporters after disembarking from his plane at Joint Base Andrews. “We had no advance warning,” he said.
The White House on Friday said it had instructed the Pentagon to move any forces necessary in the region “to enhance deterrence, ensure force protection, and support the full range of U.S. objectives.”
Earlier on Friday, before boarding the plane back to Maryland, Austin told CNN in a videotaped interview that a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah could result in a number of displaced people and civilian casualties that would “equal or exceed” the number in Gaza.
Gaza’s health ministry has recorded the deaths of more than 41,000 people amid Israel’s nearly year-long military campaign to unseat Hamas in the densely populated Palestinian enclave.
Austin further told CNN that US forces in the region “will be ready for any contingencies.” “We will have the right assets and people in place,” he said.
Iran’s embassy in Lebanon called the Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh “a bloody massacre” and said it “represents a serious escalation and changes the rules of the game.”
“The perpetrator will be appropriately punished,” the embassy said in a post on the social media site X.
US deployments in region
The Pentagon dispatched an additional roughly 60 personnel to Cyprus earlier this week in case the Biden administration authorizes an evacuation of US citizens from Lebanon in the coming days.
The US Marine Corps’ 24th Expeditionary Unit, borne by four ships of the Navy’s Amphibious Ready Group, remains in the eastern Mediterranean as a quick-reaction force in case of an evacuation from Lebanon.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is in the Persian Gulf region – closer to Iranian shores – and was joined last month by the USS Georgia, an Ohio-class submarine capable of carrying more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“Diplomacy continues to be the best way forward, and it’s the fastest way to let displaced Israeli and Lebanese citizens on both sides of the border get back to their homes,” Austin told reporters at Joint Base Andrews.
“The path to diplomacy may seem difficult to see at this moment, but it is there, and in our judgment, it is necessary,” U.S. Secretary of State [unfinished].
The disconnect between Washington’s repeated pleas for calm and the images of an escalating war reaching Beirut underscored the Biden administration’s fumbled [unfinished].
Earlier this week, the State Department unlocked an additional $3.5 billion in weapons funding for the Israeli military, even as Israeli warplanes pounded targets across Lebanon and Washington officials publicly called for de-escalation.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly defied a call by Biden and a host of U.S. allies for a 21-day ceasefire in the conflict with Hezbollah.
Fourth time
Friday’s devastating airstrikes in Beirut marked at least the fourth time Pentagon officials have claimed in recent months that Israeli leaders kept them in the dark about the nature of major escalatory strikes against Iran-linked officials. In April, Israeli F-35s bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing at least six officers of Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – including its top commander for the Levant region.
The lack of forewarning about the sensitive nature of the targets in that strike frustrated Pentagon officials, prompting Austin to privately urge Gallant to keep him more closely informed ahead of future operations that could significantly escalate tensions with Iran.
Israeli intelligence is believed to have been behind the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh at an IRGC guesthouse in Tehran in late July. Biden administration officials said at the time that Israeli counterparts had not alerted them about the operation in advance.
Last week, Gallant vaguely tipped off the U.S. defense chief about a coming Israeli operation in Lebanon just before Israeli intelligence detonated thousands of Hezbollah pagers and radios, killing several hundred and wounding thousands more, people familiar with the call said. But U.S. officials said the Israeli attack was nothing like what they had anticipated.
Austin spoke with the Israeli defense minister for a second time on Friday evening. Details of the call were not immediately made public by the Pentagon.