October 4, 2024
BEIRUT (AP) — The Israeli military on Thursday warned people to evacuate communities in southern Lebanon that are outside a U.N.-declared buffer zone, signaling that it may widen a ground operation launched earlier this week against the Hezbollah terrorist group.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces said they had struck around 200 Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including weapons storage facilities and observation posts. Strikes continued overnight when a series of massive blasts rocked Beirut’s southern suburbs. It was not immediately clear what was targeted or if there were casualties.
At least nine Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where Israel announced the start of what it says is a limited ground incursion earlier this week. The fighting comes as the region braces for Israel's response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack.
The Israeli army said a strike Thursday on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank killed Hamas’ leader in Tulkarem. The military said the strike was carried out in coordination with the Shin Bet internal security service, but it gave no details on the target. Tulkarem is a militant stronghold in the northern West Bank.
The Israeli military said Thursday that its strikes in Lebanon had killed at least 15 Hezbollah fighters.
The Israeli military also said Thursday that it had killed a senior Hezbollah terrorist, Mohammed Anisi, who was involved in the group’s development of precision-guided missiles. Anisi was killed in an airstrike targeting the group’s intelligence branch in Beirut, the army said.
So far, ground clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have been confined to a narrow strip along the border.
Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the militants were to withdraw north of the Litani, and Lebanon's armed forces were to patrol the border region along with U.N. peacekeepers.
Neither Lebanon's army nor the peacekeepers were capable of imposing any agreement on Hezbollah by force, and Israel says it defied the resolution and built extensive military infrastructure in towns and villages near the border. Lebanon has accused Israel of violating other parts of the resolution.
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah after nearly a year of rocket attacks that began Oct. 8 and displaced some 60,000 Israelis from communities in the north. Israel has carried out retaliatory strikes over the past year that have displaced tens of thousands on the Lebanese side.
In recent weeks, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his top commanders.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they launched two drones at Tel Aviv overnight. The military said it identified two drones off the coast of the bustling metropolitan area, shooting one of them down while the other fell in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which also includes armed groups in Syria and Iraq. They have launched attacks on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians, drawing retaliation in a cycle that has repeatedly threatened to set off a wider war.
The region once again appears on the brink of such a conflict after Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday, which it said was a response to the killing of Nasrallah, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who was with him, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who was killed in an explosion in Tehran in July that was widely blamed on Israel.
Israel and the United States have said there will be severe consequences for the barrage, which lightly wounded two people and killed a Palestinian in the West Bank. Military leaders from the two countries have been in regular communication “about what a response to Iran should look like,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Thursday.
The escalating violence in Lebanon has opened a second front in the war between Israel and Iran-backed militants that began nearly a year ago with Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago. It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders.
Mushtaha was a close associate of Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 attack. Sinwar is believed to be alive and in hiding in Gaza.
