Hezbollah, Israel trade heavy rounds of cross-border fire
BEIRUT — Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah traded fire Saturday in one of the heaviest days of crossborder fighting in recent weeks, a day after the militia’s leader urged retaliation for the targeted killing, presumably by Israel, of a top Hamas leader in Lebanon’s capital.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said that if his group didn’t strike back for the killing Tuesday of Saleh Arouri, Hamas’ deputy political leader, all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
With the risk of regional escalation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken kicked off an urgent Middle East diplomatic tour, his fourth since the Israel-Hamas war erupted three months ago.
“It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in Beirut during his own Middle East tour.
Hezbollah said it launched 62 rockets toward an Israeli air surveillance base on Mount Meron and scored direct hits in its “initial response” to Arouri’s killing. It said rockets also struck two army posts near the border. The Israeli military said about 40 rockets were fired toward Meron and that a base was targeted, but it made no mention of the base being hit. It said it struck the Hezbollah cell that fired the rockets.
Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon hit the outskirts of Kouthariyeh alSiyad, a village about 25 miles from the border, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said, adding that there were casualties. Such strikes deeper inside Lebanon have been rare since the border fighting started nearly three months ago. NNA also said Israeli forces shelled border areas including the town of Khiam. Israel’s army had no immediate comment.
Separately, the armed wing of the Islamic Group in Lebanon, the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close ally of Hamas, said it fired two volleys of rockets toward the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona on Friday night. Two of the group’s members were killed in the strike that killed Arouri.
The war in Gaza was triggered by a deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages.
In recent weeks, Israel has been scaling back its military assault in northern Gaza and pressing its offensive in the territory’s south, where most of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster while being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a video statement reiterated that “the war must not be stopped” until the objectives of eliminating Hamas, getting Israel’s hostages returned and ensuring that Gaza won’t be a threat to Israel are met.
On Saturday, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said 122 Palestinians had been killed over the past 24 hours, bringing the total since the start of the war to 22,722. The count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The ministry has said two-thirds of those killed have been women or children. The overall wounded rose to 58,166, the ministry said.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah received at least 46 bodies overnight, according to hospital records seen by The Associated Press.