Israeli commandos raid Lebanon — the latest sign Netanyahu is ignoring Biden's warnings

• Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a series of devastating attacks on Hezbollah.
• He has rejected or ignored a series of attempts by the US to head off a wider conflict.
• Biden has been criticized for trying to stop a wider war while still sending arms to Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rapidly escalating Israel's campaign against its regional foes and trampling on US diplomatic efforts in the process.

In the latest sign he's ignoring US warnings, The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli special-operations forces were carrying out raids into southern Lebanon as the possibility of a ground incursion this week loomed.

The raids were aimed at gathering intelligence and discovering Hezbollah's weaknesses, the Journal said.

Amir Avivi, a retired senior Israeli military official, told the publication that a ground invasion was imminent, a major escalation that Israeli officials have been threatening for months.

"The IDF has made a lot of preparations for a ground incursion," Avivi said. "Overall, this always includes special operations. This is part of the process."

The raids followed an unprecedented series of strikes from Israel. In the early hours of Monday, Israel struck central Beirut for the first time since 2006. It also confirmed it had killed Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, a Hamas leader, in Lebanon.

That came after the assassination of Hezbollah's top leader, Hassan Nasrallah , in a massive explosion in a suburb of Beirut on Friday, which dramatically raised the stakes of Israel's yearlong war against Iran-backed militias in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks.

Israel's stepped-up campaign against Hezbollah could be preparations for a ground invasion of Lebanon, and it risks triggering another confrontation with Iran.

US attempts to deter a wider war

President Joe Biden has long been seeking to prevent Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza from spiraling into a bigger war, which could drag in the US and regional powers.

However, some critics have claimed his approach has failed because US-supplied arms have allowed Netanyahu's embattled government to continue escalating and widening the war.

"Without US support, this war would not have been possible. It's actually the joint US-Israeli war," Gilbert Achcar, a professor of international relations at SOAS University of London, told France 24 .

"It's not so much the Israelis who are treating him as an irrelevance," Jasmine El-Gamal, who was a Pentagon advisor during the Obama administration, told The Independent .

"It's that Biden is not actually trying seriously to effect any change," she said. "He's been complaining about Netanyahu for almost a year now, but in the meantime, the US continues to send arms and funds to Israel."

The US last week appeared to be on the brink of negotiating a cross-border cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah — but just 24 hours later, Israel assassinated Nasrallah.

It was a strike that, the Journal said , shocked US officials. The publication, citing unnamed US officials, said Israel did not tip off its most important ally about the strike before it was carried out.

The White House described the killing as "a measure of justice for his many victims," though again urged against further escalation. Hezbollah was involved in the 1983 bombings of the US Embassy in Beirut and the US Marine Corps barracks in the city.

"We are shocked," one US official told CNN after Netanyahu rejected the cease-fire proposal before Israel launched its attacks.

It's the latest instance of the Israeli leader ignoring or rejecting Biden's attempts to restrain Israeli military action in Gaza and, more recently, Lebanon.

Netanyahu believes he is winning the war

A former British military chief said that may be because Netanyahu believed that he's winning the war in the Middle East.

Retired Gen. Richard Dannatt told Sky News on Sunday that Netanyahu thought he could "press on" with the conflict.

"A ground invasion of Lebanon is increasingly threatened," he told the outlet.

He said the US had been urging Israel to pull back but hadn't been doing enough to "effectively" stop Netanyahu.

"It is still supplying weapons and a lot of the stuff that Israel needs," Dannatt said.

"On the one hand, the US is calling for restraint, but on the other, they are not effectively stopping Netanyahu, and he believes that he is winning this war," he added.

Ignoring red lines

The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel.

The Council on Foreign Relations said in May that since the start of Israel's war with Hamas on October 7, the US had put in place legislation providing at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel.

Overall, since 2009, it has provided Israel with $3.4 billion in funding for missile defense, including $1.3 billion for the development of Israel's Iron Dome system, according to figures from the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs .

It's a big trading partner outside arms, too. US exports to Israel last year amounted to just over $14 billion, per figures from the United Nations Comtrade database on international trade.

Despite this, Netanyahu has ignored a series of red lines from Biden over how Israel conducts its campaign and rejected US pressure to reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas.

Sarah Leah Whitson , the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said in an article for Foreign Policy in September that Biden's reluctance to hold Israel to account was undermining the rules-based international order the president claims to champion.

Some say that as his time in office comes to an end, Biden is giving up. The White House has pushed back against these claims.

"No, he absolutely hasn't given up," Jake Sullivan, the White House's national security advisor, told CNN last week about reaching a deal to end the war in Gaza.

After the devastating blows Israel has dealt to its enemies in recent days, exposing the limits of their power and the reach of Israeli intelligence and weapons, Netanyahu likely believes that the impetus is with him.

But a widening conflict would likely not come to a conclusion quickly, US officials say.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in the wake of last week's collapsed US peace effort that if Israel rejected diplomacy, it would result in "greater instability and insecurity, the ripples of which will be felt around the world."

"The choices that all parties make in coming days," Blinken said, "will determine which path this region is on with profound consequences for its people now and possibly for years to come."

Correction: September 30, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a former Pentagon advisor. It's Jasmine El-Gamal, not Jazmine El-Galal.