Jerusalem:

Israel expanded its targets in its war with the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 18 people in its first strike on the Christian-majority town of Aitou in the north, the Lebanese Red Cross said.

So far the main focus of Israel’s military operations in Lebanon has been in the south, the eastern Bekaa Valley and the suburbs of Beirut.

The strike in the northern region hit a house that had been rented to displaced families, Aitou Mayor Joseph Trad told Reuters. In addition to the deaths, four people were injured, the Red Cross said.

Israel on Monday ordered residents of 25 villages to evacuate to areas north of the Awali River, which flows through southern Lebanon, as it intensifies its attacks in the region.

An Israeli strike killed Muhammad Kamel Naim, the commander of the anti-tank missile unit of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, in the Nabatieh area of south Lebanon, the military said.

Hezbollah has not immediately commented.

The operations come amidst high tensions between Israel and the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL in south Lebanon, with Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen on Monday repeating a call by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the UN troops to leave.

Israel and the United Nations have been trading accusations over the peacekeepers in south Lebanon, as Israel keeps pushing its forces through the area in an attempt to wipe out Iran-backed Hezbollah and its military infrastructure while it battles Hamas in Gaza.

The UN said Israeli tanks had burst into its base on Sunday, the latest allegations of Israeli violations against peacekeeping forces, that have been condemned by Hezbollah and by Israel’s allies.

Israel disputed the UN account and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the peacekeepers to withdraw, saying they were providing “human shields” for Hezbollah during an upsurge in hostilities.

Hezbollah denies it uses the proximity of peacekeepers for protection.

The Middle East, meanwhile, remains on high alert for Israel to retaliate against Iran for an October 1 barrage of long-range missiles launched in response to Israel’s assaults on Lebanon.

The Pentagon said on Sunday it would send US troops to Israel along with an advanced US anti-missile system, as Israel weighs its expected retaliation against Iran.

The Israeli military took foreign journalists into southern Lebanon on Sunday and showed them a Hezbollah tunnel shaft that was less than 200 metres away (650 feet) from a UNIFIL position, as well as weapon stashes that the troops found.

Brigadier General Yiftach Norkin said the tunnels were built a few years ago.

“We are actually standing in a military base of Hezbollah very close to the UN,” Norkin said, pointing to the shaft’s trap door in an area covered by undergrowth and overlooked by a UN observation post.

Since announcing its ground operation near the border, the Israeli military says that it has destroyed dozens of Hezbollah tunnel shafts, rocket launchers and command posts.

“We found several days ago a huge quantity of weapons originally coming from Iran and Russia. Brand new,” said Colonel Olivier Rafowicz. “They were prepared for attacking us and (launching) a large invasion into the north of Israel,” Rafowicz said, showing the journalists crates of weapons.

Reuters could not immediately verify these claims.

EXTENSIVE TUNNEL NETWORK

Hezbollah possesses an extensive tunnel network in southern Lebanon, both the group and Israel say. Israel estimates they extend for hundreds of kilometres. A Hezbollah field commander told Reuters last week that the tunnels “are the foundation of the battle.” Hezbollah has not immediately commented.

UNIFIL has said previous Israeli attacks on a watchtower, cameras, communications equipment and lighting had limited its monitoring abilities. UN sources say they fear any violations of international law in the conflict will be impossible to monitor.

The European Union’s member states have taken too long to condemn Israel’s attacks on UNIFIL soldiers in Lebanon, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Monday, describing the attacks as “completely unacceptable”.

EU countries, led by Italy, France and Spain, have thousands of troops in the 10,000-strong peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, which has said it has repeatedly come under attack from Israeli forces in recent days

On Monday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez urged European Union members to respond to a request by Madrid and Ireland to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel over its attacks in Lebanon and Gaza.

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah resumed a year ago when the operator group began firing rockets at Israeli positions in support of Hamas at the start of the Gaza war and has sharply escalated in recent weeks.

Israel says its operations in Lebanon are aimed at securing the return of tens of thousands of its residents displaced from their homes in northern Israel.

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

An Israeli airstrike killed two Lebanese soldiers and wounded three on Friday (October 11, 2024), Lebanon’s military said, just hours after the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, injuring two of them for the second day in a row.

The incidents entangling both Lebanon’s official Army — which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah — and the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon raised alarm as Israel broadens its campaign against Hezbollah with waves of heavy airstrikes across the country and a ground invasion at the border.

In central Beirut, rescue workers combed Friday through the rubble of a collapsed building, searching for survivors of an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens in the Lebanese capital the night before.

Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel over the past year in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 250 taken hostage.

In return, Israel’s military has pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, killing more than 2,237 Lebanese — including Hezbollah fighters, civilians and medical personnel — according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

Among them, the Ministry reported late Friday, were a two-year-old and 16-year-old killed by airstrikes in the southern village of Baysarieh.

Hezbollah attacks have killed 29 civilians as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, both in northern Israel since October 2023, and in southern Lebanon since Sept. 30, when Israel launched its ground invasion.

Israel strikes a Lebanese Army checkpoint

On Friday, the Lebanese Army said an Israeli airstrike hit a building near a military checkpoint in the southern Bint Jbeil province.

The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon when reports emerged that it had hit several Lebanese army soldiers. The Israeli Army said it investigated the incident but remained “unaware of any Lebanese Army facilities found in the area of the strike.”

Lebanon’s Army is not a party to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah — after Israel launched its ground invasion on Sept. 30, Lebanese soldiers withdrew some 5 kilometres (3 miles) from their observation posts along the border.

The only direct clash between the two national armies occurred on Oct. 3, when Israeli tank fire hit a Lebanese Army post also in the area of Bint Jbeil, killing a soldier and prompting Lebanese soldiers to return fire.

Both Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers are deployed in southern Lebanon to enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended a bloody monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

But Lebanon’s Army is no match for Hezbollah, and neither its soldiers nor the peacekeepers have been capable of preventing the Shiite militants from entrenching themselves in the border region. Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure along the border in violation of the U.N. resolution.

Israel hits U.N. peacekeepers again, wounding two

The Israeli military opened fire near the U.N. headquarters in Lebanon’s southern town of Naqoura on Friday, the Army said, hitting the observation post and injuring two peacekeepers for the second time in as many days.

An initial review by the Israeli Army found that soldiers in southern Lebanon targeted what they believed to be a threat located some 50 metres (yards) from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon but ultimately struck the peacekeepers.

One of the injured peacekeepers was hospitalized in the nearby city of Tyre while the other received medical care on site, the United Nations force, known as UNIFIL, said. Both were identified as Sri Lankan.

The Army repeated its warning that UNIFIL personnel abandon their positions in areas where Hezbollah militants launch rockets into Israel. Following Thursday’s attack, the U.N. peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said 300 peacekeepers in front-line positions on southern Lebanon’s border were temporarily moved to larger bases.

In a statement condemning the strike as “a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” UNIFIL reported that explosions on Friday hit the same place they did the day before, when Israeli tank fire injured two Indonesian peacekeepers, damaged vehicles and a communication system, and drew sharp international criticism.

“Peacekeepers must be protected by all parties of the conflict, and what has happened is obviously condemnable,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The French Foreign Ministry accused Israel of deliberately firing at peacekeepers and summoned the Israeli ambassador Friday in an official protest.

In a call with his Israeli counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the importance of ensuring the safety of UNIFIL forces and urged Israel to “pivot from military operations to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible,” the Pentagon said.

When President Joe Biden was questioned by reporters whether he was asking Israel to stop striking U.N. peacekeepers, he replied, “Absolutely, positively.”

UNIFIL, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The U.N. expanded its mission following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.

Beirut residents left reeling from Israeli strikes

From the Burj Abi Haidar neighbourhood of central Beirut, civil defence workers dug through concrete and twisted metal from a three-story building brought down by an Israeli airstrike the day before — the deadliest Israeli air raid to hit Beirut over the last year of war.

Thursday’s airstrikes hit two residential buildings in neighbourhoods that have swelled with displaced people fleeing Israeli bombardment elsewhere in Lebanon.

“The world suddenly turned upside down,” recalled Ahmad al-Khatib, a 42-year-old Lebanese postal worker who was with his wife and toddler daughter in his in-laws’ apartment when the bombs fell on the building next-door.

Al-Khatib said he had pulled his 2 ½-year-old, Ayla, out from under the debris of a collapsed bedroom wall. The force of the explosion had flung his wife, Marwa Hamdan, against a wall and a piece of metal hit her in the head. She remains in intensive care, he said, tears running down his cheeks.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV channel and Israeli media reported that the strikes aimed to kill Wafiq Safa, a top security official with the group, but he was not in either targeted building at the time of the strike. The Israeli military had no comment on the reports.

Another resident, Mohammed Tarhani, said he had moved in with his brother in Burj Abi Haidar after fleeing southern Lebanon to escape airstrikes in the past weeks.

“Where is one supposed to go now?” he asked.

Hezbollah kept up its rocket fire into Israel Friday, setting off air raid sirens just north of Tel Aviv. Interceptions by Israel’s air defense system scattered rocket fragments in the seaside suburb of Herzliya and sent shrapnel flying into a building there, causing damage but no casualties.

While disrupting life for Israelis, most of Hezbollah’s barrages have not caused casualties. But early Friday, an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon killed a man from Thailand working on a farm in northern Israel.

Hezbollah’s chief spokesperson vowed the group would expand its attacks into more populated areas deeper inside Israel.

“This is only the beginning,” Mohammed Afif told reporters from a smouldering street left in ruins by recent Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “I tell the enemy that you have only seen the minimum.”

Smoke rises over Beirut’s southern suburbs, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil, Lebanon on October 5, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israel expanded its bombardment in Lebanon on Saturday (October 5, 2024), hitting Beirut’s southern suburbs with 12 airstrikes and striking a Palestinian refugee camp deep in northern Lebanon for the first time.

The attack on the Beddawi refugee camp near the northern city of Tripoli killed an official with Hamas’s military wing, along with his wife and two young daughters, the Palesitnian militant group said in a statement. Tripoli is much farther north than the majority of Israel’s strikes, which have been concentrated in southern Lebanon and Beirut.

Israel has killed several Hamas officials in Lebanon since the Israel-Hamas war began in October last year, in addition to most of the top leadership of Hezbollah.

At least six people were killed in more than a dozen Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Saturday, according to National News Agency, Lebanon’s official news agency.

The Israeli military said special forces were carrying out targeted ground raids against Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon, destroying missiles, launchpads, watchtowers and weapons storage facilities. The military said troops also dismantled tunnel shafts that Hezbollah used to approach the Israeli border.

Some 1,400 Lebanese, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, have been killed and some 1.2 million driven from their homes since Israel escalated its strikes in late September aiming to cripple Hezbollah and push it away from the countries’ shared border. On Tuesday, Israel launched what it called a limited ground operation into southern Lebanon. Nine Israeli troops have been killed in close fighting in the area in the past few days, the military said.

Nearly 375,000 people have crossed from Lebanon into Syria fleeing Israeli strikes in less than two weeks, according to a Lebanese government committee. Associated Press journalists saw thousands of people continuing to cross the Masnaa Border Crossing on foot even after Israeli airstrikes left huge craters in the road leading up to it on Thursday.

Also on Saturday, Palestinian medical officials say Israeli strikes in northern and central Gaza early Saturday have killed at least 9 people, including two children.

One strike hit a group of people in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, killing at least five people, including two children, according to the Health Ministry’s Ambulance and Emergency service.

Another strike hit a house in the northern part of the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least four people, the Awda hospital said. The strike also left a number of people wounded, it said.

The Israeli military did not have any immediate comment on the strikes, but it has long accused Hamas of operating from within civilian areas.

The Israeli military warned Palestinians to evacuate along the strategic Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, which was at the heart of obstacles to a ceasefire deal earlier this summer. The military told people in parts of the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps to evacuate to Muwasi, an area along Gaza’s shore the military has designated a humanitarian zone.

It’s unclear how many Palestinians are currently living in the areas ordered evacuated, parts of which were evacuated previously.

Almost 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the nearly year-long war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.

Jerusalem:

Israel’s army chief told soldiers on Wednesday to prepare for a possible ground offensive to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon as the air force conducted hundreds of deadly strikes around the country.

“We are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry, but also to continue striking Hezbollah,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi told a tank brigade, according to a statement from the military.

Lebanon’s health minister said Wednesday’s strikes killed 51 people and injured 223, including in mountainous areas outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.

Hezbollah said it had targeted Israel’s Mossad spy agency on Tel Aviv’s outskirts in the morning — the first time it has fired a ballistic missile in almost a year of cross-border clashes sparked by the Gaza war.

In response, Israel said it hit 60 Hezbollah intelligence sites, among hundreds of the group’s targets struck across Lebanon.

It came amid escalating cross-border clashes, after Israeli raids on Monday killed at least 558 people in the deadliest day of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war.

Nour Hamad, a 22-year-old student in the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek, described living “in a state of terror” all week.

“We spent four or five days without sleep, not knowing if we will wake up in the morning,” she said.

In Tel Aviv, sirens sounded following Hezbollah’s unprecedented missile launch.

Tel Aviv resident Hedva Fadlon, 61, told AFP: “The situation is difficult. We feel the pressure and the tension… I don’t think anyone in the world would like to live like this.”

Israel calls reservists

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Hezbollah’s attack on Tel Aviv was “deeply concerning” but added there was “still time and space for a diplomatic solution here to de-escalate the tensions and to prevent an all-out war”.

The Israeli military said “over 280 Hezbollah” targets had been struck across Lebanon on Wednesday, adding the strikes were ongoing.

“Fighter jets struck 60 terrorist targets belonging to Hezbollah’s intelligence directorate,” the army said.

It also said two reserve brigades were being called up “for operational missions in the northern arena”, adding this would “enable the continuation of combat against the Hezbollah terrorist organisation”.

The United Nations Security Council said it would hold an emergency meeting on the crisis in New York on Wednesday, while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the situation was critical.

– Rocket commander killed –

The UN’s International Organization for Migration on Wednesday said 90,000 people had been displaced in Lebanon since Monday.

Among them, “many of the more than 111,000 people displaced since October… are likely to have been secondarily displaced”, a statement from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs added.

It came after two days of what the Israeli military called “extensive” strikes on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon.

The Lebanese group on Tuesday confirmed an Israeli claim that it had killed their rocket forces commander Ibrahim Kobeissi in a strike on the Lebanese capital.

At the UN General Assembly in New York, Secretary-General Guterres issued a stark warning.

“We should all be alarmed by the escalation. Lebanon is at the brink,” he said, while cautioning against “the possibility of transforming Lebanon (into) another Gaza”.

US President Joe Biden, whose government is Israel’s main backer, said “full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest”.

Defiant Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his departure for New York until Thursday, where he too is due to speak at the General Assembly.

“During the day, the prime minister will hold consultations to discuss the continuation of the attacks in Lebanon,” his office said.

Netanyahu defied international calls for restraint, vowing on Tuesday to keep up Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.

“We will continue to hit Hezbollah… the one who has a missile in his living room and a rocket in his home will not have a home,” he said.

Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, condemned Israel’s raids, with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saying the recent killing of Hezbollah commanders would not crush the group.

“Some of the effective and valuable forces of Hezbollah were martyred, which undoubtedly caused damage to Hezbollah, but this was not the sort of damage that could bring the group to its knees,” he said.

Elusive ceasefire

While the Israel-Lebanon border has seen near-daily clashes for a year, the violence escalated dramatically last week, when coordinated communications device blasts that Hezbollah blamed on Israel killed 39 people and wounded almost 3,000.

Then Israel carried out an air strike on Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold, killing a top military commander and other fighters and civilians.

Efforts to end the war in Gaza, which analysts say are key to stopping the escalation in Lebanon, remain stalled.

Netanyahu has been accused by critics of stalling in Gaza ceasefire negotiations and prolonging the war to appease far-right coalition partners.

The war in Gaza began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,495 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

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

An Israeli airstrike on the southern suburbs of Beirut on Tuesday killed a Hezbollah commander who was a leading figure in its rocket division, two security sources in Lebanon said, as fears of a full-fledged war in the Middle East mounted.

The sources identified the commander who was killed as Ibrahim Qubaisi. The attack, in which six people were killed, dealt another blow to the Iran-backed group which has faced a series of setbacks at the hands of Israel over the past week.

The relentless pressure on Hezbollah has increased fears that nearly a year of conflict will explode into another all-out war and destabilise the Middle East, where a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah’s ally Hamas is already raging in Gaza.

Israel struck the Hezbollah-controlled area of the Lebanese capital for a second consecutive day after mounting a new wave of airstrikes on targets in Lebanon.

After nearly 12 months of war against the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza on its southern border, Israel is shifting its focus to the northern frontier, where Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

The health ministry gave an initial toll of six dead and 15 wounded in the Beirut strike.

The Israeli military carried out airstrikes against Hezbollah on Monday which Lebanese authorities said killed more than 500 people.

The airstrike hit a building in the usually busy Ghobeiry neighbourhood in Beirut. One of the security sources shared a photo showing damage to the top floor of a five-storey building.

Israel’s military chief said earlier that attacks on Hezbollah would be accelerated.

“The situation requires continued, intense action in all arenas,” said Military Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi after holding a security assessment.

Lebanese authorities said 558 people had been killed, including 50 children and 94 women, in Israel’s airstrikes on Monday. A further 1,835 were wounded, they said, and tens of thousands more have fled for safety.

The casualty tolls and the charge from the most powerful and advanced military in the Middle East has spread panic in Lebanon, which suffered from devastating destruction when Israel and Hezbollah fought in 2006.

“We are waiting for victory, God willing, because as long as we have a neighbour like Israel, we can’t sleep safely,” said Beirut resident Hassan Omar.

Afif Ibrahim, a taxi driver from southern Lebanon, was defiant.

“They (Israel) want us (Lebanese) to kneel, but we kneel only to God in our prayers; we bow our heads to no one but God,” he said.

GROWING CALLS FOR DIPLOMACY

Calls for diplomacy are growing as the conflict worsens, with UN human rights chief Volker Turk urging all states and actors with influence to avert further escalation in Lebanon.

“I believe that we can still find a path forward to get de-escalation between Israel and across that northern border between Israel and Lebanon and bring about a diplomatic solution that allows people to return to their home,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told MSNBC.

The fighting has raised fears that the United States, Israel’s close ally, and regional power Iran, which has proxies across the Middle East – Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq – will be sucked into a wider war.

Hezbollah last week suffered heavy losses when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded in the worst security breach in its history.

The operation was widely attributed to Israel, which has a long history of sophisticated attacks on foreign soil. It has not confirmed or denied responsibility.

Israel’s intelligence and technological prowess has given it a strong edge in both Lebanon and Gaza. It has tracked down and assassinated top Hezbollah commanders and Hamas leaders.

But Hezbollah has proven resilient during decades of hostilities with Israel, challenging superior firepower.

The group, which was founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982 to counter an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, is a more formidable enemy than Hamas.

Hezbollah used a new rocket, Fadi 3, in an attack on an Israeli army base, the group announced in a message posted on Telegram on Tuesday.

Its media office said on Tuesday that Israel was dropping leaflets with a “very dangerous” barcode on them onto Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, warning that scanning it by phone would “withdraw all information” from any device.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Hezbollah’s media office did not say if anything else was written on the flyers.

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

Beirut, Lebanon:

Israeli strikes on Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon killed 700 people including children on Monday, according to the Lebanese health ministry, in the largest cross-border escalation since war erupted in Gaza on October 7.

War began when Palestinian group Hamas carried out the worst-ever attack on Israel, with Iran-backed groups around the region, chiefly Hezbollah, increasingly drawn into the violence.

On Monday, Israel said it had hit more than 300 Hezbollah sites with dozens of strikes, while Hezbollah said that it had targeted three sites in northern Israel.

The strikes on Lebanon, which also wounded more than 700 people according to the health ministry, were the deadliest in nearly a year of violence along the border with Israel.

“Israeli enemy strikes on southern towns and villages since this morning” have killed “182 people and wounded 727 others”, the health ministry said, with casualties including “children, women and paramedics”.

World powers have implored Israel and Hezbollah to pull back from the brink of all-out war, with the focus of violence shifting sharply from Israel’s southern front with Gaza to its northern border with Lebanon in recent days.

“We sleep and wake up to bombardment… That’s what our life has become,” said Wafaa Ismail, 60, a housewife from the south Lebanon village of Zawtar.

More to come

Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told people in Lebanon to avoid potential targets linked to Hezbollah as strikes would “go on for the near future”.

Hagari said Israel’s military “will engage in (more) extensive and precise strikes against terror targets which have been embedded widely throughout Lebanon”.

He told civilians “to immediately move out of harm’s way for their own safety”.

Hezbollah, a powerful political and military force in Lebanon, says it is acting in its fight along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

In divided Lebanon, large parts of the south and east of the country, as well as the southern suburbs of capital city Beirut, are seen as strongholds of Hezbollah, where the group has historically wielded influence and built up services for its Shiite Muslim support base.

Another Gaza?

Ahead of the annual General Assembly in New York, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warned of Lebanon becoming “another Gaza” and said it was “clear that both sides are not interested in a ceasefire” there.

Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported “more than 80 air strikes in half an hour” early Monday targeting the south of the country, as well as intense raids in the Bekaa Valley to the east.

The education minister said schools in targeted areas would close for two days.

Explosions around the ancient city of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon triggered flashes of fire and sent smoke billowing into the sky.

The Israeli military said Monday it would launch “large-scale” strikes in the Bekaa Valley in the east, warning residents of the area to move away from Hezbollah sites there.

‘Quickly evacuate’

Residents and local media said strikes also hit the outskirts of the coastal city Tyre.

NNA said Lebanese had received phone messages from Israel telling them “to quickly evacuate”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel has dealt “a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined”, but Israeli leaders say they want their residents to return safely to border areas.

Hezbollah’s deputy chief, Naim Qassem, said the group was in a “new phase, namely an open reckoning” with Israel, and ready for “all military possibilities”.

Both were speaking after Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel caused damage in the area of Haifa, a major city on Israel’s north coast.

Since the cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah began in October, tens of thousands of people on both sides have fled their homes.

An Israeli military official, who cannot be further identified under military rules, on Monday outlined the goals of the military operation.

It seeks to “degrade threats” from Hezbollah, push them back from the border, and then to destroy infrastructure built near the frontier by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, the official said.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati urged the UN and world powers to deter what he called Israel’s “plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns”.

‘Wider war’

US President Joe Biden, whose country is Israel’s main ally and weapons supplier, said his administration was “going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out”.

An Israeli air strike in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold on Friday killed the Radwan Force commander, Ibrahim Aqil, along with other commanders and civilians.

That followed coordinated communications device blasts on Tuesday and Wednesday that killed 39 people and wounded almost 3,000. Hezbollah blamed Israel.

Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli military production facilities and an air base in the Haifa area with rockets as “an initial response” on Sunday.

On Monday the group said it had again rocketed the “Rafael defence industry complexes” near Haifa, as well as two military positions.

“No country can live like this,” said Ofer Levy, 56, a customs officer, who lives on the edge of Haifa.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Of the 251 hostages also seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,431 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

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