An aircraft of Middle East Airlines (MEA), Lebanon’s flag carrier, takes off from Beirut International Airport on October 6, 2024 amidst smoke rising from nearby sites targeted overnight by Israeli air strikes in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The United States warned Israel on Monday (October 7, 2024) not to attack Beirut airport or the roads leading to it, as the Israeli Army carried out intensive strikes against Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs.

“We think it’s very important that not only the airport be open, but that the roads to the airport be open, so that American citizens who want to leave can get out, but also citizens of other countries,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.

The Israeli air force carried out a strike on Monday in the southern suburbs of Beirut, near the international airport, a security source told AFP.

For the past week, the United States has been chartering near-daily flights to get its citizens and their families out of the country as the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah escalates.

Some 900 people have taken the flights so far, Miller said, though he added that none of them were fully booked.

The U.S. is also reserving seats on commercial flights that continue to operate.

Some 8,500 Americans have contacted the State Department to inquire about departure conditions, but this does not mean they all wish to leave, he added.

The spokesman also refused to comment on Israeli strikes in Lebanon — and Beirut in particular — and whether or not they respected international law.

“I don’t have a characterization of them one way or the other,” he said.

“But of course, we expect them to target Hezbollah in a way that complies with international humanitarian law and minimizes civilian casualties.”

The United States has at times criticized the number of people killed by Israel in Gaza — more than 41,000 over the past year — and President Joe Biden has called some of Israel’s actions there “over the top.”

But, so far, Washington hasn’t changed its policy of backing Israel in its expanding military operations.

Israel launched a vast military campaign in response to a bloody attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on October 7, 2023.

In recent weeks it has expanded its war from the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based, to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. supports Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, Miller said.

But, he added, “we are very cognizant of the many times in the past where Israel has gone in on what looked like limited operations and has stayed for months or for years.

“And ultimately, that’s not the outcome that we want to see.”

Smoke rises in Beirut’s southern suburbs during sunset, after Israeli air strikes, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil, Lebanon, October 6, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday (October 6, 2024), the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.

During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometres away.

It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.

On Sunday, a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.

“Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.

Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in the area of Beirut”.

Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.

This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.

The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.

For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on September 27.

A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.

Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.

Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.

His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.

GAZA WAR

Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.

At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.

Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.

Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.

Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.

Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.

In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.

Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.

Israel has been weighing options for its response.

Israel carried out another series of punishing airstrikes Friday (October 4, 2024), hitting suburban Beirut and cutting off the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria for tens of thousands of people fleeing the Israeli bombardment of the Hezbollah militant group.

The overnight blasts in Beirut’s southern suburbs sent huge plumes of smoke and flames into the night sky and shook buildings kilometres away in the Lebanese capital. Additional strikes sent people running for cover in streets littered with rubble in the Dahiyeh neighbourhood, where at least one building was levelled and cars were burned out.

Follow Israel strike LIVE updates on October 4

The Israeli military said it targeted Hezbollah’s central intelligence headquarters around midnight. It did not say who it was aiming for or if any militants were killed in that strike, but it claimed to have killed 100 Hezbollah fighters in the last 24 hours.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported more than 10 consecutive airstrikes in the area. 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.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah launched about 100 rockets into Israel on Friday, the Israel military said.

The Israeli military also said that a strike in Beirut the day before killed Mohammed Rashid Skafi, the head of Hezbollah’s communications division. The military said in a statement that Skafi was “a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was responsible for the communications unit since 2000” and was “closely affiliated” with high-up Hezbollah officials.

Thursday’s strike along the Lebanon-Syria border, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Beirut, led to the closure of the road near the busy Masnaa Border Crossing — the first time it has been cut off since Hezbollah and Israel began trading fire almost a year ago.

Israel said it targeted the crossing because it was being used by Hezbollah to transport military equipment across the border. It said fighter jets had struck a tunnel used to smuggle weapons from Iran and other proxies into Lebanon.

Hezbollah is believed to have received much of its weaponry through Syria from Iran, its main backer.

Associated Press video footage showed two huge craters on each side of the road. People got out of cars, unable to pass, carrying bags of their possessions as they crossed on foot. More than 250,000 Syrians and 82,000 Lebanese have fled across the border into Syria during the escalation of the past two weeks. There are a half-dozen crossings between the two countries, and most remain open.

Israel launched its ground escalation in Lebanon on Tuesday, and its forces have been clashing with Hezbollah militants in a narrow strip along the border. Israel has vowed to put an end to Hezbollah fire into northern Israel, after nearly a year of exchanges between the two sides that drove tens of thousands of people from their homes on both sides of the border. Israeli strikes over the past two weeks killed some of Hezbollah’s key members, including longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah.

On Thursday, Israel warned people to evacuate communities in southern Lebanon, including areas beyond the buffer zone declared by the United Nations after Israel and Hezbollah fought a monthlong war in 2006.

Israeli Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told reporters Friday that the ground operations were limited, aimed at rooting out Hezbollah militants and making the border safe for northern residents of Israel to return to their homes, “First of all, our mission is to make sure they’re (Hezbollah) not there,” Shoshani said. “Afterwards we will talk about how we make sure they don’t come back.” Nine Israeli troops have been killed in close fighting in the area, which is saturated with arms and explosives, the military said.

Two more soldiers were killed and two were severely wounded by a drone attack in northern Israel, military officials said.

An umbrella group of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it carried out three drone strikes Friday in northern Israel. In recent months, the group has regularly claimed drone strikes launched at Israel, but the strikes have rarely landed.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who was in Beirut on Friday to meet Lebanese officials, warned that if Israel carries out an attack on Iran, Tehran would retaliate more powerfully than it did this week when it launched at least 180 missiles into Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Hezbollah.

The missile barrage amid a series of rapidly escalating attacks has threatened to push the Middle East closer to a regionwide war.

“If the Israeli entity takes any step or measure against us, our retaliation will be stronger than the previous one,” Araghchi said after meeting Lebanon’s parliament speaker, Nabih Berri.

In the Iranian capital, Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led Friday prayers and delivered a speech in which he praised the country’s missile strikes on Israel and said Iran was prepared to conduct more strikes if needed.

He spoke to thousands of people at Tehran’s main prayer site, the Mosalla mosque, which was decorated with a huge Palestinian flag.

Hezbollah began firing into Israel the day after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which the militants killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage. Since then, Israel’s campaign in Gaza in retaliation has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, just over half them women and children, according to local health officials.

Meanwhile, Israel carried out its deadliest strike in the occupied West Bank since the Gaza war began, hitting a cafe in the Tulkarem refugee camp. At least 18 Palestinians were killed, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Relatives said a family of four, including two children, were among the dead. The Israeli military said several Hamas militants were killed, including the group’s leader in the camp.

The Israeli military said Friday that militants in Gaza fired two rockets into Israeli territory, the first time Israel has seen rocket fire from the territory in a month.

The military said one of the rockets was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system and the other fell in an open area near a kibbutz across the border from Gaza. (AP) GSP

New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during a telephone call with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, stressed on an early and peaceful resolution of the conflict in West Asia through “dialogue and diplomacy”.

The conflict in West Asia began on October 7 when the fighters of the Palestinian group Hamas rampaged into Israel, killing around 1,200 people and seizing around 250 hostages according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s military campaign has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel says it has eliminated 17,000 Hamas fighters.

PM Modi also reiterated the call for the immediate release of all hostages and continued humanitarian assistance.

The Ministry of External Affairs or MEA said, “The two leaders discussed the prevailing situation in West Asia”.

“The two leaders also discussed various aspects of the bilateral cooperation and ways to further strengthen the India-Israel Strategic Partnership, the MEA said, adding, the two leaders agreed to remain in touch.

Meanwhile, Gaza ceasefire talks in Doha were paused on Friday with negotiators to meet again next week seeking an agreement to end fighting between Israel and Hamas and free remaining hostages.

The latest round in months of on-off talks to end the war in Gaza began between Israel and mediators on Thursday. Hamas was not directly involved in the talks but was kept briefed on progress.

Last year in December, two months after war began in Gaza, PM Modi said he had reiterated India’s “consistent stand” to Benjamin Netanyahu. He said India calls for stability in the region and humanitarian assistance for those affected by the conflict.