Israel and Hamas at War, Day 352 | Israel Says It Deals Lebanon’s Hezbollah ‘Series of Blows’

(Haifa) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the army had dealt Lebanon’s Hezbollah “a series of blows” after a night of intense cross-border firefights that sent hundreds of thousands of residents of northern Israel fleeing to shelters.

The UN has warned of an “impending catastrophe” in the Middle East, amid a military escalation between the army and the powerful Hezbollah, an ally of Palestinian Hamas and supported by Iran.

After nearly a year of war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas, the front has shifted to northern Israel and the border with Lebanon, where Israeli authorities have promised to restore calm in order to bring home tens of thousands of residents displaced by the violence.

“We are determined to ensure that the people of the north can return home safely. No country can tolerate shooting at its people, at its cities, and we, the State of Israel, will not tolerate it either,” Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted as saying by his office on Sunday.

“In recent days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a series of blows that it could never have imagined. If Hezbollah has not understood the message, I promise you, it will understand,” said the prime minister, who spoke for the first time on this subject since the deadly attacks on Hezbollah’s transmission devices and then an Israeli strike that targeted the movement’s elite unit near Beirut on Friday.

Schools closed

Early Sunday, the Israeli military announced that it was carrying out strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, after the Islamist movement fired on populated areas in northern Israel, reaching the area around the major city of Haifa.

“There was an alarm and immediately after a big explosion, a very, very big explosion,” said Achiya Itschaky, a resident of the village of Kiryat Bialik where the shooting set houses and cars on fire.

“It’s war, it’s not pleasant for anyone,” added Sharon Hacmishvili, another resident of the village.

“Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to take refuge in air raid shelters in northern Israel,” said army spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.

He said the Israeli army had struck a series of targets since Saturday “in order to prevent a larger-scale attack.”

The Israeli passive defense ordered the closure of all schools until Monday 6 p.m. in the northern regions of the country, some of which are located up to 80 kilometers from the Lebanese border.

According to the army, “around 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones” were fired towards Israel during the night, most of them from Lebanon towards the north of the country, “without causing significant damage”.

Hezbollah claimed to have targeted Israeli military production facilities and to have targeted with “dozens of rockets” of the Fadi-1 and Fadi-2 type the “Ramat David base and airport”, located deep in Israeli soil, about 45 kilometers from the border.

“Growing pressure”

“We are under increasing pressure from Hezbollah and vice versa. In Haifa, many schools are closed and offices are empty. It reminds me of October 7, when everyone stayed home,” said Patrice Wolff, a resident of the city, recalling the bloody attack carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war.

Lebanese authorities announced on Sunday that Israeli strikes had killed three people in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah said two of its fighters had been killed.

The exchanges of fire have intensified since the wave of spectacular explosions of Hezbollah’s transmission devices, attributed to Israel, which left 39 dead and 2,931 wounded on Tuesday and Wednesday in the movement’s strongholds in Lebanon, according to the country’s authorities.

Then on Friday, an Israeli strike on a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut dealt a new blow to Hezbollah, decapitating its elite force, the Radwan unit, killing 16 members.

Among them were Ibrahim Aqil, the unit’s chief, whose funeral is scheduled for Sunday, and Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi, who was in charge of military operations until earlier this year.

The strike left 45 dead in total, including civilians, according to Lebanese authorities.

“No military solution”

“As the region stands on the brink of imminent catastrophe, we cannot say it enough: there is NO military solution to make either side safer,” UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert warned on Sunday.

In Iraq, pro-Iranian armed groups claimed responsibility for drone strikes on Israel on Sunday, which for its part announced that it had intercepted “several suspicious flying objects” coming from Iraq.

Faced with “the unpredictable nature of the ongoing conflict,” the United States “urged” its nationals on Saturday to leave Lebanon.

On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that “Lebanon’s front with Israel would remain open until the end of the aggression in Gaza,” where the human toll from Israeli bombings is increasing every day after all attempts at mediation have failed.

The war broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas commandos carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil that resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures that include hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.

Of the 251 people abducted during the attack, 97 are still being held in Gaza, 33 of whom have been declared dead by the army.

In retaliation, Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007 and considers it a terrorist organization, along with the United States and the European Union. Its army has launched an offensive on the Palestinian territory that has so far killed at least 41,431 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza, which the UN considers reliable.