Hostilities continue unabated in the Middle East.
The armed movement Hezbollah announced in the early hours of the morning that its members were involved in battles with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, while at the same time a series of explosions shook the southern suburbs of Beirut. Lebanon’s information minister, Ziad Makari, expressed concern that his country would turn into “a new Gaza.”
Meanwhile, Said Atala, a leading figure in Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, was killed along with three members of his family when Israeli shelling hit a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, early today in information related to the Palestinian Islamist movement.
Hezbollah – Israeli army clashes – Explosions in Beirut
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned on Friday that the Islamic Republic’s allies, notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, would continue the fight against Israel, heightening concerns that a Middle East-wide conflagration was imminent, two days before the anniversary of Hamas’ unprecedented incursion into southern Israeli territory.
“Soldiers of the Israeli enemy are again attempting to advance to the outskirts of the municipality of Adaisah village” and “hostilities are continuing,” Hezbollah said in a statement released early this morning, after previously asserting that it had forced elements of the Israeli army to “fall into retreat” in this zone.
Furthermore, the Lebanese movement assured that it targeted Israeli troops in the area of Yaroun, in the southern part of the country, with a “barrage of rockets”, as well as in two locations on the other side of the border.
At the same time, a series of explosions was heard in a southern suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, AFP correspondents reported. Earlier, the Israeli army ordered the immediate evacuation of civilians from certain areas.
Footage shows smoke rising from an area near the airport.
On the night of Thursday to Friday, the Israeli army unleashed extremely heavy shelling on southern suburbs of Beirut, demolishing entire buildings.
According to the Ynet news website — the online version of the Jedot Aharonot newspaper — the bombings targeted the headquarters of Hezbollah’s intelligence service, where Hashem Safyeddin, a potential successor to the party’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, is believed to be.
Escalation in Lebanon a year after the Hezbollah-Israel front
The rapid escalation in Lebanon comes almost a year after Hezbollah opened a front with Israel, the day after the war broke out in the Gaza Strip. In the months that followed, border skirmishes were practically daily, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes on both sides of the border.
According to Lebanon’s disaster management agency, more than 2,000 people have been killed in the country since October 2023, more than a thousand since September 23, when Israel’s airstrikes intensified.
The Lebanese government estimates that at least 1.2 million civilians have been displaced.
“Resistance in the region will not subside, despite the martyrs,” Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei said yesterday at a large Islamic mosque in Tehran, in a rare speech on the occasion of the weekly Friday prayer.
He ruled that an attack of some 200 missiles against Israel was the “minimum” possible retaliation for the September 27 killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike in a Beirut suburb, and that of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, on July 31, in an explosion in Tehran attributed to the Israeli secret services.
The attack led to Israel and Iran exchanging threats of further retaliation.
“No” Biden to strike Iran’s oil facilities – “Yes” from Trump
US President Joe Biden estimated yesterday that Israel should “consider other options” and not hit Iran’s oil infrastructure, something he had mentioned the day before yesterday. He said he was trying to “mobilize the rest of the world” to ease tensions in the Middle East.
The Republican former president and re-candidate in the November 5 presidential elections, Donald Trump, for his part, decided that Israel should “hit” Iranian nuclear facilities.
The US military announced yesterday that it had struck 15 targets — facilities, weapons systems, etc. — of the Houthis in Yemen, from where the rebel movement, which is close to Iran, is launching attacks against Israel and against ships it believes are linked to it or with its allies, above all the USA and Britain.
The Israeli military, for its part, said it had killed 250 Hezbollah fighters and hit more than 2,000 Hezbollah positions or facilities after launching ground operations against the movement in southern Lebanon on Monday, where it said it had suffered nine casualties.
Two more of his men were killed yesterday in a drone attack launched by Iraq against a military base in the Golan Heights, occupied since 1967 and annexed by Israel, according to the radio of the Israeli armed forces.
Yesterday the Israeli army launched a raid in eastern Lebanon, near the Masnaa border crossing, destroying part of the vital road network linking the country with neighboring Syria. Israeli authorities accuse Hezbollah of acquiring weapons from Syrian territory. The Israeli army also announced that it hit an “underground tunnel” of the Shiite movement.
Some 374,000 people, mostly Syrian refugees in Lebanon, have entered Syrian territory after fleeing in recent days, according to Lebanese authorities.
A hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut and two others in the southern part of the country announced that they were forced to suspend their operations due to Israeli shelling.
The Islamic Health Committee, an organization close to Hezbollah, said Israeli shelling killed 11 first aid workers in southern Lebanon on Friday, including seven in front of the Marjayoun hospital.
Hezbollah also accused Israel of also hitting “civil protection groups” a short distance from Beirut, killing one of them.
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