The threat of conflict is the last thing the people of Lebanon need

Social media across the country has been ablaze with messages urging immediate calm following cross-border rocket fire and airstrikes

Israeli self-propelled howitzers fire towards Lebanon from a position near the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona (AFP via Getty Images)

It didn’t feel like Lebanon could take much more, and then the airstrikes and rocket fire started and suddenly the spectre of another war with Israel appeared on the horizon.

The country is in the grip of a string of unprecedented events. It has been pushed to the brink by what the World Bank has said is one of the most extreme economic collapses in the past 150 years. It is still reeling from a major explosion in the capital.

Three quarters of the country (which also has the highest number of refugees per capita in the world) does not have enough food or money to buy food.

The UN has warned that, in a few weeks, four million people won’t have access to safe water, including one million refugees. Food prices have in some instances gone up six-fold. There is pretty much no mains power.

Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of the blast in Beirut. Thousands took to the streets in grief and anger as no one has been held responsibility for the devastation, despite the fact there is a damning paper trail of evidence showing that the authorities knew about the explosive stockpile in the Port of Beirut which caused the blast. That evening, as security forces flooded protesters with tear gas, a rocket salvo from the south of the country was suddenly fired at Israel.

Israel hit back with artillery and airstrikes the next day, the first time Israel says it has bombed Lebanon in seven years. Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah then fired another barrage of rockets in return.

Suddenly, people on both sides were talking of war. On Sunday, an unnamed Israeli official even warned Israel’s public radio Kan that “war might unfold”, adding that Israel understands recent incidents at the border “will not be the last” and that Israel “would not accept an ongoing drizzle of rocket fire from Lebanon”. The day before that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, vowed that any future airstrikes or artillery fire would be “met with a response”.

Obviously, in any circumstance war is a disaster for civilians, but in Lebanon it is hard to express just how devastating it would be. It’s telling, therefore, that there was instant backlash across the country.

In a rare challenge to Hezbollah, locals from a Druze area in the south called Chouaya, surrounded Hezbollah’s rocket launcher as it attempted to drive through the neighbourhood. Hezbollah even admitted that “a number of citizens intercepted them” but maintained the launch had taken place “in a wooded area totally far from residential areas, to preserve the security of citizens”.

The Lebanese army said in a statement it had detained the “four people who launched the rockets and seized the launcher used in the operation”.

Social media in Lebanon has been ablaze, with people urging immediate calm. Saad Hariri, a prominent Sunni politician and ex-prime minister designate, has even warned that using the south as a platform for “regional conflicts” was “very, very dangerous” and puts Lebanon in the “crosshairs of the wars of others”, in a reference to Israel and Iran.

For now, despite the posturing, I do not believe either Israel or Hezbollah want war. The language on all sides reflects that. Nasrallah spoke about “an appropriate and proportionate” response to Israel and made a point of emphasising that they chose to fire on “open land... to send a message”.

There is also little appetite for war in an Israel that is currently led by a coalition of hard-right pro-settler groups, leftists and an Arab party in a razor-thin majority that is at constant risk of being dismantled. Only a few months ago, militants in Gaza fired more rockets at Israel over an 11-day conflict than in the entirety of the seven-week war in 2014 (Israel also unleashed an unprecedented wave of strikes in return). At the same time there were fears the country could dissolve into civil war in its mixed cities. But the problem is, it might be out of everybody’s hands, and the resulting conflict could drag in the region’s superpowers.

No group has claimed responsibility for rockets launched against Israel from Lebanon on Wednesday’s Beirut blast anniversary, which triggered the Israeli airstrikes and further rocket launches by Hezbollah. In the past, small Palestinian factions have fired sporadically on Israel and have got into trouble for that.

Israel has repeatedly said it holds Lebanon as a whole responsible for any attacks and talks about restoring deterrence. But it’s unclear how much control either Hezbollah or the Lebanese authorities have, or what support they give to these smaller armed groups.

The border is so tense it feels as if just one miscalculation, or a rogue group’s efforts, could trigger a landslide and possibly an even wider regional conflict, dragging Iran further into the mix, which would be utterly devastating for Lebanon.

The situation is made even more worrying by soaring tensions between Iran, Israel, the US and Gulf countries in the Arabian Sea after a series of attacks on tankers, which have been blamed on Iran, which Tehran continues to deny.

Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz has already said Israel is willing to strike Iran. Tehran has warned this would be met with “a decisive response”.

The worst-case scenario is that Lebanon becomes the staging ground for an inter-region conflict.

The county is already on knees in so many ways. War would be the final straw.