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An Israeli soldier, part of a force that infiltrated across the border, last week stirred controversy by planting his country’s flag on a hill in the Lebanese town of Maroun Al-Ras — despite Israel’s presence in Beirut’s skies having persisted for weeks.

On the ground, Yahya Sinwar has achieved for Israeli extremists what hard-line Israeli leaders like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and even Ariel Sharon could not. Sharon, who withdrew from Gaza in 2005, dismantled settlements and handed the territory over to the Palestinian Authority.

The course of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon will reshape the Iranian-Israeli conflict. How?

Israel has left Tehran with few options. Let us not forget that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 crushed the Palestinian Fatah as an armed struggle movement.

When the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was asked why he was defeated in the 1967 war, he said it was due to Israel’s air superiority. “That is why it fought us (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) simultaneously.”