BEIRUT:

Israel and Lebanon exchanged heavy fire into Sunday, with Israeli warplanes carrying out the most intense bombardment in almost a year of war across Lebanon’s south, while Hezbollah claimed rocket attacks on military targets in Israel’s north. The Israeli military said it struck around 290 targets on Saturday including thousands of Hezbollah rocket launcher barrels and said it would continue to strike targets of the Iran-backed movement.

Israel closed schools and restricted gatherings in many northern areas of the country and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights early on Sunday.

Sirens sounded all night as multiple rockets and missiles were fired from Lebanon and Iraq, most of which were intercepted by Israeli aerial defence systems, the military said.

Israeli media reported that a number of buildings were hit directly or by falling missile debris, and ambulance services said they treated some lightly injured people. No serious casualties were reported.

Hezbollah said it targeted the Israeli Ramat David Airbase with dozens of missiles in response to “repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon”, the group posted on its Telegram channel early on Sunday.

The successive barrages of rocket attacks launched by Hezbollah at Ramat David are the deepest strikes it has claimed since hostilities began.

Iran-backed Iraqi militants in a statement also claimed an explosive drone attack on Israel early on Sunday.

ESCALATING ATTACKS

The escalating attacks come less than 48 hours after an Israeli airstrike targeting Hezbollah commanders killed at least 37 people in a suburb of the Lebanese capital, according to authorities.

Hezbollah, a powerful Iran-backed group, said 16 members including senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among those killed on Friday in the deadliest strike in nearly a year of conflict with Israel.

Israel’s army said it hit an underground gathering of Aqil and leaders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and had almost completely dismantled its military chain of command.

The attack levelled a multi-story residential building in the crowded suburb and damaged a nursery next door, a security source said. Three children and seven women were among those killed, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Friday’s strike sharply escalated the conflict and inflicted another blow on Hezbollah after two days of attacks in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.

The death count in those attacks, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, has risen to 39 with more than 3,000 injured. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.

In what it said was the initial retaliation for the attacks with the exploding devices, Hezbollah on Sunday posted on its Telegram channel that it had launched rockets at Israeli military-industry facilities.

Israel quickly responded, striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, the military said in a statement.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said he was worried about escalation but that the Israeli killing of a top Hezbollah leader brought justice to the group, which Washington designates a terrorist organization.

“While the risk of escalation is real, we actually believe there is also a distinct avenue to getting to a cessation of hostilities and a durable solution that makes people on both sides of the border feel secure,” Sullivan told reporters.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati cancelled a planned trip to the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

ISRAEL BRACES FOR RETALIATION

Hezbollah has said it would keep fighting Israel until it agrees to a ceasefire in its war against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza – triggered by a Hamas-led rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

U.S. officials say that is unlikely anytime soon. Israel wants Hezbollah to cease fire and withdraw forces from the border region, adhering to a U.N. resolution signed with Israel in 2006, irrespective of any Gaza deal.

Anticipating retaliation, the Israeli military restricted gatherings and raised the alert level for residents of northern communities. The alert went as far south as the coastal city of Haifa, signalling Israel thought Hezbollah could strike deeper than it had since the war with Hamas began.

In southern Lebanon on Saturday, people described huge explosions that lit up the night sky and shook the ground as Israel carried out its latest strikes.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who said last week Israel was launching a new phase of war on the northern border, posted on X: “The sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.”

Tens of thousands of people have left their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border since Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in October in sympathy with Palestinians in Gaza.

A communique from a U.S. summit hosted by President Joe Biden with the leaders of Japan, India and Australia stressed the need to prevent the Gaza war “from escalating and spilling over in the region” but did not specifically mention the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

With at least 70 people killed in Lebanon over the past week, the conflict toll in the country since October has surpassed 740 during the worst Israel-Hezbollah flare-up since a 2006 war.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Hezbollah, which has exchanged fire with Israeli forces since October, last went to war with Israel in 2006 and has since expanded its domestic and regional influence, politically and militarily.

Financed and armed by Iran, Hezbollah is the most prominent actor in the so-called axis of resistance — regional pro-Tehran armed groups opposed to Israel that also include Palestinian group Hamas, Iraqi movements, and Yemen’s Huthi rebels.

Since the day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that triggered war in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah has launched cross-border attacks from Lebanon seeking to tie up Israeli military resources in support of its Palestinian ally.

Fears of all-out war have spiked after Hezbollah vowed to avenge an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs last month that killed a key commander, Fuad Shukr, and Iran pledged retaliation for the killing in Tehran, blamed on Israel, of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Hezbollah-Israel War

Hezbollah, whose name means “Party of God” in Arabic, was founded during the Lebanese civil war after Israel besieged the capital Beirut in 1982, and has since become a key domestic political player.

Created at the initiative of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the Shiite Muslim movement gained its moniker as “the Resistance” by fighting Israeli troops who occupied southern Lebanon until 2000.

Israel and Hezbollah fought a month-long war in July-August 2006 that killed some 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 in Israel, mostly soldiers, after the group kidnapped two Israeli troops in a cross-border raid.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 ended that conflict and called for the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers to be the only armed forces deployed in south Lebanon.

But Hezbollah has maintained a discreet presence there, where it enjoys broad support and where experts say it likely has a network of underground tunnels.

On August 16, the group released a video showing what appeared to be underground tunnels and large missile launchers, without revealing their location.

The group also has a strong presence in the Bekaa valley in east Lebanon near the border with Syria.

Hezbollah has bolstered its powerful arsenal, including with guided missiles, and says it can count on more than 100,000 fighters.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was elected secretary-general in 1992 after Israel assassinated his predecessor, and he rarely appears in public. 

Hezbollah’s Regional Influence

Hezbollah is a key actor in the Middle East, where it plays a central role in the “axis of resistance”. It has supported and trained Iran-backed groups in Iraq and Huthi rebels in Yemen, who since October have claimed attacks on Israel and Israeli-linked shipping interests.

Hezbollah is also present in Syria, where many of its members have fought in support of President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s civil war, with Damascus also an ally of Tehran.

Domestically, Hezbollah is the only Lebanese faction to have retained its weapons after the country’s 1975-1990 civil conflict, doing so in the name of “resistance” against Israel.

It is now a key political player, though detractors have accused it of being a “state within a state”.

Political deadlock between Hezbollah allies and their adversaries since late 2022 has prevented the election of a new president, in a country experiencing a grinding economic crisis.

Hezbollah’s Services

Founded in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah has become predominant in all Shiite Muslim areas of Lebanon, while its key religious and financial institutions are based in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The movement runs an extensive social services network, complete with schools, hospitals, emergency responders and a wide range of charitable organisations serving its supporters.

Its trademark yellow flags and huge portraits of Nasrallah, along with pictures of dead commanders, fighters and “axis of resistance” figures, adorn areas of the country where it is popular.

The United States has considered Hezbollah a “terrorist” organisation for years, blaming it for a series of bombings and hijackings in the 1980s, including one targeting US Marines in Beirut. The European Union applies the classification to the group’s armed wing.

In 2022, a UN-backed court sentenced two Hezbollah members in absentia to life imprisonment for a huge Beirut bombing in 2005 that killed Lebanon’s former premier Rafic Hariri.