IDF will intervene, Israel warns Lebanon
ISRAEL warned Lebanon that the time for a diplomatic solution to repeated attacks from Hezbollah along its northern border “is running out”.
Benny Gantz, a cabinet minister and favourite to take over from Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, said that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) would soon intervene if Lebanese authorities did not act to stop the Iran-backed group from firing across the frontier.
On Wednesday, the north of Israel endured the worst barrage of rockets from Hezbollah in Lebanon since cross-border fighting erupted there after the Hamas attack on Oct 7.
“The situation on Israel’s northern border demands change,” Mr Gantz said on Wednesday night.
“The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out.
“If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the IDF will do it.”
Cross-border strikes have intensified since Hamas’s Oct 7 attack on Israel. More than 100 people have been killed in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters. But civilians, including several journalists, have also been killed in Israeli strikes.
The clashes have led to fears of a wider conflict in the region.
On Wednesday, at least 34 rockets were fired on the towns of Rosh Hanikra and Kiryat Shmona which were evacuated in October.
No casualties were reported in the attacks on an area that has been emptied of its residents, but several buildings sustained damage as only a portion of the rockets were intercepted by Israel.
The rise in the attacks follows an Israeli air strike on Damascus that killed a senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Iran has since pledged to retaliate.
Speaking at the commander’s funeral in Tehran yesterday, Ali Khamenei,
Iran’s Supreme Leader, said the coun- try’s revenge “will be nothing less than the removal of the Zionist regime”.
Senior Israeli officials also signalled their patience with Hezbollah was running out.
As Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister, brought a group of foreign ambassadors to the north on Wednesday, eight rockets were fired at the Rosh Hanikra area, prompting Mr Cohen and the diplomats to take cover in a bomb shelter in the town of Shlomi, from which all 9,000 residents had been evacuated.
He said Israel “will grant a certain amount of time for a political solution – and if none is reached, all options are on the table”.
Israel and the United States are offering Hamas a pause in fighting, a release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange of hostages and also an IDF withdrawal from populated areas in Gaza, according to Israel’s Channel 13.
Hamas previously insisted it needed a permanent truce, not a temporary ceasefire.