Disappearance of Lebanon’s prime minister raises tension
BEIRUT — When Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri made a sudden trip abroad last week, it was taken at first to be a routine visit with his political patron, Saudi Arabia.
But the next day, he unexpectedly announced his resignation by video from Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
He has yet to return to Lebanon.
On Friday, the Iranianbacked militia Hezbollah, part of his governing coalition at home, charged that the Saudis were holding him against his will, while the Saudis have said they were protecting him from an unspecified assassination plot.
Now the Hariri case has become just one in a profusion of bewildering events that are escalating tension in the Middle East and fueling anxiety about whether the region is on the verge of war.
Even before the events of the past week, analysts and officials in the region had been increasingly anxious about what they see as a volatile combination: an impulsive, youthful Saudi leader escalating threats to roll back growing Iranian influence, an equally impulsive Trump administration signaling broad agreement with Saudi policies, and warnings from Israel that it may eventually fight another war with Hezbollah.
Analysts and diplomats are scrambling to figure out what the latest developments mean.
Hariri, until he announced his resignation Saturday, had shown no signs of planning to do so.
Hours later, on Saturday evening, a missile fired from Yemen came close to Riyadh before being shot down. Saudi Arabia blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the missile, suggesting that they had aided the Iran- aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen to fire it. Friday, the top U. S. Air Force official in the Mideast, said Iran did manufacture the missile and that remnants of it bore “Iranian markings.”
Before the world had a chance to absorb this news,
the Saudi Arabian crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the arrest of hundreds of Saudis, including members of the royal family, in what was either a crackdown on corruption, as Saudi officials put it, or a purge, as outside analysts have suggested.
It then emerged that the week before, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, who has been sent on missions both to Israel and Saudi Arabia, had visited Riyadh on a previously undisclosed trip and met until the early morning hours with the crown prince. The White House has not announced what they discussed but officials privately said they were meeting about the administration’s efforts to forge an Israeli- Palestinian peace deal.
No one expects Saudi Arabia, which is mired in a military conflict in Yemen, to start another war itself. On Friday, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said Saudi Arabia had asked Israel to attack Lebanon, after essentially kidnapping Hariri.
He provided no evidence of his claim, but Western and regional analysts have also said that, given all the confusing and unexpected events and unpredictable players, they could not rule out such a scenario.
Israeli officials, however, have been publicly predicting another war with Hezbollah while also vowing to do all they can to postpone it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long considered Iran to be Israel’s foremost enemy, a nuclear threat as well as a strategic adversary seeking to convert postwar Syria into a staging ground for attacks against Israel or into a corridor to transfer missiles and other weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
So Saudi Arabia’s stepped- up efforts to oppose Iranian influence in Lebanon drew measured applause in Jerusalem. But many Israelis fear that the aggressive actions by the Saudi crown prince could drag Israel into a war it does not want.