A senior Pentagon official slammed the Hamas attacks on Israel as “ISIS-level savagery.”
Oct 9,
2023. Posted by Balkan Periscope - Hellas
A senior US defense official said Monday that military posture increases in
the Middle East were intended to serve as a deterrent signal to Iran, Lebanon’s
Hezbollah and any other proxy in the region following the Hamas attack
likened to “ISIS-level savagery.”
“Those adversaries should think twice,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters.
Earlier
Monday, Hezbollah and the Israeli army engaged in cross-border fire. The
Iran-backed group said three of its fighters were killed before announcing a
retaliatory attack on Israeli barracks. Hezbollah previously said that they
would join Hamas in the war on Israel if the latter invaded Gaza or targeted
Hamas members inside of Lebanon. Unofficial rules of engagement between
Hezbollah and Israel have mostly limited their fighting to Syria.
The US has
been “flooding the zone” with high-level phone calls and engagement to make
clear the US desire to contain this conflict.
Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin told his Israeli counterpart over the weekend that the
US was sending additional equipment and resources, including munitions, to
arrive in Israel in the coming days. Austin also ordered the deployment of a US
aircraft carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean and the augmentation
of fighter jets. The senior defense official told reporters that the strike
group would arrive “very soon.”
The
Pentagon is in touch with US industry to look at ways to expedite the shipment of
pending orders for military equipment that otherwise may have been considered
routine. The Defense Department is also looking at the Pentagon’s stockpiles to
see what can be made immediately available to Israel.
Al Arabiya
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