ISRAEL’S intensified bombing raids over Lebanon are pulling the entire region towards a war of unknown proportions.

Tel Aviv’s Western sponsors will try to portray Hezbollah as the aggressor, given its deputy leader Naim Qassem’s announcement of an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel. 

But the Lebanese militia’s escalating rocket fire follows Israel’s murderous exploding-pager stunt last week, and its subsequent serious bombing of Beirut. 

Currently Israel is issuing warnings to Lebanese citizens to move from their homes or risk being bombed — even government ministers have received text messages to this effect. Israel may not have declared war on Lebanon, but when you are dropping bombs on a country’s capital the formalities are academic.

Opening what is effectively a third front in its war of aggression — since the horrific assault on Gaza is already tied to an escalated ethnic cleansing operation in the West Bank — could easily ignite still wider conflict: militias in Iraq have already begun firing rockets into the Golan Heights, Syrian territory unlawfully occupied by Israel. 

Despite twice having been asked — by a vote of the Iraqi parliament in 2020, and by the country’s prime minister in January — to withdraw troops it still deploys in Iraq 21 years after the illegal US-British invasion, the United States has not done so: meaning its own soldiers will be obvious targets if the war spreads. Attacks on Cyprus, where RAF bases play a logistical role in supporting Israel’s war machine and facilitate the continued flow of US weaponry to the Israeli Defence Forces, have also been mooted.

The shadow of Iraq haunted the last Labour government to its demise. Does the newly elected British government want to see its missions derailed, its agenda overshadowed, by another catastrophic war in the Middle East?

A war, moreover, which the British people oppose even more strongly than they did Iraq, with months of huge, sustained peace protests demonstrating the strength of public anger at Israel’s genocidal conduct?

Like US President Joe Biden, Foreign Secretary David Lammy insists he does not want this. That Britain is doing everything it can to avoid escalation.

It’s a falsehood so brazen it would be laughable if the mounting daily death toll did not rule out so flippant a response. 

Lammy’s Labour conference grandstanding about Iran destabilising the Middle East is a diversion. 

Iran’s theocratic rulers are clearly keen to avoid a war, understandable given deep economic problems exacerbated by Western sanctions, significant industrial unrest and ongoing social tensions following the violent suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom women’s rights movement. Iran’s responses to extreme Israeli provocations — the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 11, in April, and more recently the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — have been carefully limited. 

It couldn’t be clearer that the escalation is coming from one side — Israel.

And this makes Lammy’s claim that stopping arms exports to Israel “would lead to a wider war and an escalation that we in the UK are committed to stopping” utterly absurd.

Britain is facilitating Israel’s escalation of the war, and only an end to all arms sales — backed up by real diplomatic penalties including cancelling the Israel-UK “road map” giving it favoured trading status — will change that.

By refusing to act, the Labour government is endorsing Israel’s project — which is not the elimination of Hamas, but the erasure of the Palestinians as a people and suppression of any possibility of the independent, sovereign Palestine that Britain, like the US, claims to want to see.

That is not what Labour members want. It is not what the public want. Lammy and Keir Starmer must be made to change course.