"A dramatic escalation". This is how father David Maria Jaeger, a Franciscan friar and an expert in the Middle East, judges the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, that burst out after the capture of two soldiers of Tshal, the Israeli army, by the Lebanese Hezbollah. In a statement to SIR, the expert explains that "Israel thinks it has been attacked, no longer by just a militant organisation, Hezbollah, but by the Lebanese State itself, and it is determined to respond on the basis of such judgement". As everybody knows, Hezbollah has a Parliamentary membership within the Lebanese authorities. According to father Jaeger, by opening this new front, "Palestinians will lose, because the Hezbollah’s wage of war has diverted attention from the humanitarian emergency of Gaza and might have derailed the half-secret negotiations, aimed not only at having corporal Gilad Shalit released, but also at a general ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and its surroundings, at the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian convicts, and at a glance, however slight, at much better times". "In any case he concludes even if, at the end of the current shooting on several fronts, some Palestinian convicts were released in exchange for the Israeli soldiers, Hezbollah will take the credit for it, not the Palestinian government, which reports to Hamas. The only way out is peace, which, as the Pope said at the Angelus on June 29th, needs the generous contribution of the international community”.
