IT’S a prospect that doesn’t bear thinking about, but one that many ordinary Lebanese know is a serious possibility. United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres knows it too, that much he made clear this week.

“One rash move – one miscalculation – could trigger a catastrophe that goes far beyond the border and, frankly, beyond imagination,” Guterres (below) told reporters.

“Let’s be clear: The people of the region and the people of the world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.”

But how many times now have we listened to such warnings from the UN and other world leaders only to have those horrifically costly events play out before our eyes?

The fact is that Israel’s war with Hezbollah need not have happened, but it did so primarily because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted it to.

Having been both a correspondent in the region and Middle East watcher for years, I don’t believe for a moment that Hezbollah wanted all-out war, the group clearly having settled for a balance between deterrence and a war of attrition.

The problem for Hezbollah was that it also linked any cessation of its own hostilities towards Israel to a ceasefire in Gaza, something that Netanyahu was never going to accept and in fact has done all he can to block.

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Netanyahu might have made a similar claim about Israel not wanting all-out war, but the fact is he has long sought the ultimate showdown with Hezbollah.

For the simple, inescapable issue here, is that the Israeli leader wants, in fact needs, these forever wars, first in Gaza and now in Lebanon. And it’s not just a way of preventing Netanyahu being held to account or keeping him out of jail.

Those right-wing ultranationalist members of his government want them too. For these hawks and religious fanatics believe this is their moment, and by far the best opportunity ever to alter the political landscape of the region by destroying Palestinian and Lebanese resistance once and for all.

With Israeli public opinion broadly in support of neutering the Hamas and Hezbollah threat, and Israel’s US ally in the shape of the duplicitous Biden administration unwilling to use its leverage to restrain Israel, the war we are now seeing unfold was almost inevitable.

Yes, I know Hezbollah have been lobbing rockets into Israel for some time, but this is nothing new and time and again when confronted by an Israeli response, the Lebanese militia have backed off and opportunities presented themselves for both sides to de-escalate.

But under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel equally time and again has goaded Hezbollah, baiting it with one onslaught after another, culminating in the mass detonation of communication devices that even had former CIA chief and US defence secretary Leon Panetta calling it “a form of terrorism.”

That Hezbollah is now on the back foot though is undeniable. There’s no doubt that the level of penetration of the Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group by Israeli intelligence is extensive.

Hezbollah has long prided itself on its discipline, training, battle experience and loyalty of its members. That loyalty might now be severely tested for just like those within the fanatical cadre of the Israeli government, Hezbollah too has its zealots, hot heads and hawks who will not settle for any backing down in the face of a full-scale Israeli ground invasion.

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Whatever one might think of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, he’s no political fool and a canny strategist. It was Nasrallah after all who back in 2006 faced down Israel, but later admitted that had he known then what subsequently would happen after he ordered the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers he would have thought twice.

“We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude,” said Nasrallah back then. “You ask me, if I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

It was quite an admission, and now faced with the possibility of Israel unleashing its full military might, Nasrallah must once again be thinking about those consequences back in 2006. He knows too that while Hezbollah is a much more formidable force than it was in those days, it does not have the popular or regional support that it had then.

He’s acutely aware also that Israel will sense Hezbollah’s potential moment of weakness and that there is no shortage of those within Israel’s political and military ranks determined to press home any advantage.

The bottom line here, as one Israeli commentator in the daily newspaper Haaretz said this week, is that Israel is on the fast track to war, even if the public hasn’t officially been told this.

Could that war turn Lebanon or parts of it into another Gaza? The short answer is yes, given Israel’s track record in both places currently and historically. Indeed it’s hard to see how Israel could achieve its aim of dealing a neutralising blow to Hezbollah without a ground invasion of some degree.

The very fact that Israel this week said that the safe return of 60,000 evacuees to the north of the country was now an official war aim, suggests such a move is coming. But the reality on the ground is that those Israeli citizens could never be safely returned unless the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) invade and occupy Lebanon at least as far north as the Litani River that stretches east to west across much of southern Lebanon, thereby creating a buffer zone.

It is the Litani River of course that was mentioned in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006, in a resolution that calls for a complete cessation of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel and the establishment of a demilitarised zone. If this cannot be achieved through international diplomacy then Israel it seems will do it by military means with all that implies.

It’s not surprising then that comparisons are currently being drawn not with 2006, but with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That invasion produced horrific civilian casualties, and even when Israel’s military campaign was over, Hezbollah lived to fight another day – today.

As history has shown and the current rising toll of civilian casualties underscores, any Israeli operation inside Lebanon is sure to result in great loss and suffering. Lebanon might be bigger than Gaza and Hezbollah much stronger than Hamas, but that only makes the potential human cost even greater.

It’s a sobering thought indeed.