Israeli warplanes pound Hezbollah in Lebanon raising fears of escalation
After terror group fires mortars over border...
ISRAELI warplanes pounded Hezbollah positions in Lebanon yesterday in the worst border clashes for 17 years after the terrorist group unleashed a series of rockets into northern Israel.
Tensions were racheted up amid fears of the fighting spreading into a regional conflict just a day after Hezbollah’s firebrand leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened to escalate the war against Israel, warning of a ‘true battle’.
His heavily armed group, backed by Iran, carried out simultaneous attacks on Israeli positions along the Lebanese border, as residents of south Lebanon reported the fiercest Israeli strikes yet.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said its planes had struck Hezbollah targets in retaliation for their attack and combined the air strikes with artillery and tank shelling.
Last night, the US government warned Americans to flee Lebanon ‘due to the unpredictable security situation’. The US embassy in Beirut warned that there would be ‘no guarantee of evacuations in crisis situation’.
Lebanese sources said Hezbollah had launched a powerful missile not used before in the fighting, saying it had hit an Israeli position across the border from the villages of Ayta al-Shaab and Rmeich.
Hezbollah has exchanged sporadic fire with Israeli troops since its Palestinian ally Hamas carried out the murderous attack on Israel on October 7, leaving 1,400 people dead and more than 240 taken hostage in Gaza. Yesterday, Hezbollah said it attacked at least six Israeli border posts, adding that ‘direct hits were scored and technical equipment was destroyed’.
Lebanese sources reported that Hezbollah fired two huge Burkan (‘volcano’) missiles for the first time. The weapons, carrying 1,100lb warheads, were previously used by Hezbollah and Syrian government forces to destroy the fortifications of Syrian opposition fighters.
Hezbollah said one of its fighters was killed on the border, raising the death toll for the militant group since the fighting began to 56.
Ten civilians, including a Reuters
journalist, have been killed as well as several Palestinian fighters.
Israel has said it has no interest in a conflict on its northern frontier. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Hezbollah that Israel would launch counterstrikes of ‘unimaginable’ magnitude wreaking ‘devastation’ on Lebanon.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati and shared his ‘deep’ concern about exchanges of fire along southern border with Israel.
The battle between Israel and Hamas also intensified, and not just in the terrorists’ stronghold of Gaza City. Mail on Sunday journalists
witnessed shell or rocket explosions in the northern area of Beit Hanoun. The scarred stump of the Omar Ibn Abd al-Aziz mosque’s minaret was the only barely recognisable building against an apocalyptic backdrop of razed homes and offices.
Israeli military strikes killed multiple civilians at a UN shelter and hospital in the main combat zone in the Gaza Strip as the assault intensified on Hamas.
The strikes came amid growing international uproar over the soaring death toll and deepening humanitarian crisis.
Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of
committing ‘war crimes’ and said it should not be above international law. Speaking at a news conference in Amman, alongside his Egyptian and US counterparts, Mr Safadi also said Mr Blinken had a leading role to play in efforts to end the war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said it had encircled Gaza City, the main target of its offensive to crush Hamas, but offered a three-hour window for residents trapped by the fighting to flee south.
But the IDF said its troops came under mortar and anti-tank fire from Hamas during the pause in fighting.
An IDF spokesman said: ‘This incident further proves that Hamas exploits the Gazan population and prevents them from acting in the interest of their own safety.’
Only a few miles away in Israel, the border town of Sderot was virtually deserted yesterday after most of its population were rehoused following the Hamas attacks of October 7. We spoke to defiant residents who remain there despite the risk of repeated rocket attacks from Gaza. The thump of outgoing Israeli artillery shells formed a constant soundtrack.
Supermarket worker Morria Cohen, 24, still living in Sderot with her mother, said she wasn’t the least bit scared by the loud noise of the shells being fired into Gaza .
‘Each one is like music to my ears,’ she told the MoS.
On October 7, Morria, her mother, sister and two young nephews watched in horror as heavily armed Hamas terrorists invaded their town in pick-up trucks and motorbikes.
‘Seven of them got out of one pickup truck,’ she recalled, ‘and my mother called the children inside
because they were shooting. It was a miracle we all survived.’
The family huddled together for safety in their bomb shelter for nearly 24 hours, dreading the sound of a boot crashing through their front door.
‘We had no electricity, no phone, no water and no internet,’ she said.
Morria believes her house and others were ignored by the attackers because their nearby neighbourhood police station was the primary target for the terrorists.
They killed the officers on duty and barricaded themselves inside as Israeli troops surrounded them later in the day.
The IDF responded by simply demolishing the police station with its huge ‘Teddy Bear’ bulldozers, killing the Hamas men inside.
Morria and her mother decided to return to the ghost town of Sderot, she said, ‘because it is our home and we won’t let anyone push us out.
‘Israel will take a long time to recover from the psychological and physical damage that was done that day, but we will recover.’
A few streets away, Russian Israeli immigrant Vladimir Kreiderman, 65, lives in a singleroom bungalow next door to a property destroyed by one Hamas rocket, while another one slammed into the house four doors down in the opposite direction.
He also vowed to stay.
The former Soviet soldier, who used to patrol the Russian-Chinese border in the 1970s, declared: ‘The police didn’t even bother asking me to leave – they know me. We Russians are tough!’