- The Israeli military said that its fighter jets “targeted and eliminated” Muhammad Hussein Srour and identified him as “the commander of Hezbollah’s air unit”. It was the fourth attack in a week targeting Iran-backed Hezbollah members.
- According to reports, Srur, born in 1973, was among a number of top advisers sent by Hezbollah to Yemen to train the country’s Huthi rebels.
- Israeli strikes on Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon have killed more than 700 people this week and displaced about 1,18,000 people, raising fears of all-out war in the Middle East.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected the 21-day truce proposal by the US, France, and other allies, and ordered his troops “to continue the fighting with full force”.
- Netanyahu said that ensuring the safe return of Israelis to their homes was a priority.
- “We will speak in actions, not words,” he wrote on X. “Let no one be confused: we will not stop hitting Hezbollah until we return our residents safely to their homes,” he said in another post.
- A joint statement from US President Joe Biden, his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, leaders from Japan and key Gulf Arab powers — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab – said that the situation in Lebanon has become “intolerable” and “is in nobody’s interest, neither of the people of Israel nor of the people of Lebanon”.
- Their appeal for the three-week ceasefire came hours after Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, told soldiers Wednesday to prepare for a possible ground offensive against Hezbollah.
- Over 1,500 people have so far been killed since Israel and Hezbollah started fighting across the Lebanese border after the war in Gaza erupted when Hamas, a Hezbollah ally also backed by Iran, attacked Israeli towns on October 7 last year.
- In 2006, the war between Hezbollah and Israel killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
