Hezbollah has said it has entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel after launching a series of rocket attacks on the north of the country as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.
In a significant escalation of the conflict, Israeli warplanes carried out their most intense bombardment in almost a year across southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah responded with its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The events prompted the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to warn of the risk “of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza”.
During a funeral for a top commander killed along with 44 other people in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Naim Qassem, said on Sunday that an “open-ended battle of reckoning has started”. “Threats will not stop us,” he said. “We are ready to face all military possibilities.”
As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war as authorities said four people had been killed and nine injured over the weekend. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was also trenchant in his rhetoric.
“In the last few days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it did not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you it will understand the message,” he said.
“No country can tolerate shooting at its residents, shooting at its cities, and we, the state of Israel, will not tolerate it either … We will do everything necessary to restore security.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said early on Sunday that hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa. They said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas”, pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.
Six people were reported to have been injured.
The UN’s special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a statement on X: “With the region on the brink of an imminent catastrophe, it cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer.”
As she wrote, the Israeli health ministry urged hospitals in northern Israel to transfer their operations to facilities with extra protection from rocket and missile fire. Rambam hospital in Haifa would transfer patients to its secure underground facility, the ministry said.
In Lebanon, a relentless week of attacks has made the conflict impossible to ignore. Three children and seven women were among those killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil, Lebanese authorities have said.
His assassination followed a wave of attacks earlier in the week in which walkie-talkies and pagers commonly used by Hezbollah members exploded, killing 42 people and wounding more than 3,000. Israel is presumed to have been behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.
The sudden, brutal nature of the attacks shattered whatever sense of safety Lebanese people had felt. “It was the first time that I felt that the war is around us, that we’re not safe any more. We don’t know where the next Israeli attack will be. I’m avoiding gatherings or unknown areas,” said Amal Cherif, a 52-year-old activist and resident of central Beirut.
The fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah militants is taking place in parallel to the unrelenting conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Seven people were killed on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike hit a school in western Gaza City that had been housing hundreds of displaced people, Palestinian health officials said.
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