Israel kept Pentagon in the dark about Beirut strikes, Austin says

WASHINGTON – The Biden administration was not informed in advance of Israel’s decision to launch a barrage of airstrikes in Lebanon’s capital on Friday, Pentagon officials said.

Israeli warplanes completely destroyed six high-rise apartment buildings in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh on Friday, reportedly in an attempt to kill Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah has confirmed Nasrallah’s death. The strikes were initially reported to have killed at least six people and wounded 91 others, Lebanon’s health ministry said, but the death toll is likely to rise.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke on the phone with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, around 11 a.m. on Friday morning while Austin was on a return flight to Washington after a diplomatic visit to the UK.

By the time the two defense chiefs spoke, however, the Israeli air raids in Lebanon were already underway, Pentagon officials said. 

During their conversation, Gallant informed Austin that Nasrallah was a target of the strikes. Austin, according to a person familiar with the call, expressed dismay. "He was not happy," said a second source who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“The United States was not involved in Israel’s operation,” the Pentagon chief affirmed to reporters after disembarking from his plane at Joint Base Andrews on Friday. “We had no advance warning,” he said.

Just a day prior, the US defense chief publicly called on Israel and Hezbollah to “choose a different path” and allow diplomacy to resolve the conflict, which has killed more than 700 people in Lebanon already this week and displaced more than 200,000 others since the fighting began last year.

'Ready for any contingencies'

Israel’s strikes occurred just days after Austin had been scheduled to stop in Israel for meetings with top defense officials. But the trip was postponed after Israeli intelligence detonated thousands of mobile pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon last week. The Pentagon has not publicly clarified why the trip was postponed. 

Officials at the time said that Austin had not been forewarned about the nature of that Israeli attack, either.

The White House announced late on Friday that President Joe Biden instructed the Pentagon to move any forces necessary in the region “to assess and adjust as necessary US force posture in the region to enhance deterrence, ensure force protection, and support the full range of US objectives.”

Earlier on Friday, before boarding the plane back to Maryland, Austin told CNN in a pre-recorded interview that a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah could result in a number of displaced people and civilian casualties that would “equal or exceed” the number in Gaza.

Gaza’s health ministry has recorded the deaths of more than 41,000 people amid Israel’s nearly year-long military campaign to unseat Hamas in the densely populated Palestinian enclave.

Austin further told CNN that US forces in the region “will be ready for any contingencies.” “We will have the right assets and people in place,” he said.

Iran’s embassy in Lebanon called the Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh “a bloody massacre” and said it “represents a serious escalation and changes the rules of the game.”

“The perpetrator will be appropriately punished,” the embassy said in a post on the social media site X.

US deployments in region

The Pentagon dispatched an additional roughly 60 personnel to Cyprus earlier this week in case the Biden administration authorizes an evacuation of US citizens from Lebanon in the coming days.

The US Marine Corps’ 24th Expeditionary Unit, borne by four ships of the Navy’s Amphibious Ready Group, remains in the eastern Mediterranean as a quick-reaction force in case of an evacuation of American personnel from Lebanon.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is in the Persian Gulf region, closer to Iranian shores. It was joined earlier this month by the USS Georgia, an Ohio-class submarine capable of carrying more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

“Diplomacy continues to be the best way forward, and it’s the fastest way to let displaced Israeli and Lebanese citizens on both sides of the border get back to their homes,” Austin told reporters after landing at Joint Base Andrews.

"The path to diplomacy may seem difficult to see at this moment, but it is there, and in our judgment, it is necessary," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday.

The disconnect between Washington's repeated pleas for calm and the images of war reaching Beirut underscored the Biden administration's fumbled attempts to restrain Israeli leaders' strategic ambitions.

Earlier this week, the State Department quietly unlocked an additional $3.5 billion in weapons funding for the Israeli military, even as Biden administration officials publicly called for de-escalation as Israeli warplanes pounded targets across Lebanon and military leaders threatened a ground incursion.

Speaking before the UN General Assembly in New York just prior to the Israeli strikes in Dahiyeh, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly defied Biden and a host of US allies who called for implementation of a 21-day ceasefire in the conflict with Hezbollah.

Pentagon keeps its distance

Friday's devastating airstrikes in Beirut marked at least the fourth time Pentagon officials have claimed in recent months that Israeli leaders kept them in the dark before undertaking major escalatory strikes against Iran-linked officials. In April, Israeli F-35s bombed Iran's consulate in Damascus, killing at least six officers of Iran's paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including its top commander for the Levant region.

The lack of forewarning about the sensitive nature of the targets in that strike frustrated Pentagon officials, prompting Austin to privately urge Gallant to keep him more closely informed ahead of future operations that could significantly escalate tensions with Iran.

Israeli intelligence is believed to have been behind the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh at an IRGC guesthouse in Tehran in late July. Biden administration officials said at the time that Israeli counterparts had not alerted them about the operation in advance.

Last week, Gallant tipped off the US defense chief about a coming Israeli operation in Lebanon just before Israeli intelligence detonated thousands of Hezbollah pagers and radios, killing more than a dozen and wounding thousands more, people familiar with the call said. But US officials said the Israeli attack was nothing like what they had anticipated, Al-Monitor previously reported.

Austin spoke with the Israeli defense minister for a second time on Friday evening. A readout of the call was not immediately made public by the Pentagon.

This article has been updated since its initial publication to include additional information on Austin's phone call with Gallant.