MARJAAYOUN, Lebanon—For a few hours it looked like war, a real war that could escalate into the all-out Middle Eastern conflict the world has been dreading.
Early Sunday morning, around a hundred Israeli warplanes launched missile strikes in what it called preemptive action to take out Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. Shortly afterward, the Iranian-backed militia group launched hundreds of drones and missiles, including Katyusha rockets, into northern Israel and the Golan Heights in what it said was a planned retaliation for the assassination last month of one of its leaders, Fuad Shukr.
Both sides then stepped back from the brink Sunday night, although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned it was “not the end of the story.”
