Written by Mayan Lubell and Maya Gebeily
JERUSALEM/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Israel wants to hurt Hezbollah but does not want to drag the Middle East into all-out war, two Israeli officials said on Monday, as Lebanon braced for a response after a rocket attack killed 12 children and teenagers in the occupied Golan Heights.
Two other Israeli officials said Israel was preparing for the possibility of several days of fighting following Sunday’s rocket attack on a sports stadium in a Druze village.
The four officials, including a senior defense official and a diplomatic source, spoke on condition of anonymity and offered no further information about Israel’s plans for retaliation.
The diplomatic source said, “Estimates indicate that the response will not lead to a comprehensive war, and this will not be in our interest at this stage.”
Israel and the United States blamed the Lebanese Hezbollah movement for the attack, but Hezbollah denied any role in the attack.
The incident has added to fears that months of cross-border hostilities between Israel and an Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group could spiral into a wider, more destructive war.
Late Sunday, Israel’s security cabinet authorized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant to decide on “the manner and timing” of the response to the rocket attack.
Israel’s largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, quoted unnamed officials as saying the response would be “limited but significant.”
The report said response options ranged from a limited but “photogenic” attack on infrastructure, including bridges, power plants and ports, to hitting Hezbollah weapons depots or targeting high-ranking Hezbollah leaders.
In the wake of the Gaza war, hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah became the worst since the war broke out between them in 2006.
Hezbollah, an ally of the Islamist Hamas movement, said its campaign of rocket and drone attacks on Israel was aimed at supporting the Palestinians, and indicated it would only cease fire when the Israeli assault on Gaza stopped.
The conflict on the border between Israel and Lebanon has forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes on both sides of the border.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed the importance of preventing an escalation of the conflict in a phone call with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
They discussed efforts to reach a diplomatic solution that would allow citizens on both sides of the border between Israel and Lebanon to return to their homes, and ongoing efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages held there.
drone attack
An Israeli drone strike killed two people and wounded three others in southern Lebanon on Monday, Lebanon’s civil defense said, the first deaths in Lebanon since Saturday’s incident.
A Lebanese civil defense official told Reuters that an infant was among the wounded, without clarifying whether the dead were fighters or civilians.
The Israeli military said its air defenses shot down a drone that penetrated airspace from Lebanon into the western Galilee region on Monday.
Flights at Beirut International Airport were cancelled or delayed as airlines responded to the possibility of Israeli retaliation.
Both Israel and Hezbollah have been making strenuous efforts to avoid a full-scale war since they began exchanging blows in October.
Hezbollah denied firing the rocket that killed the children. It said in a statement early Saturday that it had fired a missile at a military target in the Golan Heights, a border area that Israel captured from Syria after the 1967 war and has since annexed in a move not generally recognized internationally.