(Beirut) The armed movement Hezbollah claimed early Saturday that it was engaged in clashes with Israeli troops on the Lebanese border, as new explosions rang out in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, warned on Friday that his allies, mainly Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, would continue the fight against Israel, accentuating fears of a conflagration in the Middle East, two days before the first anniversary of the unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israeli soil.
“The soldiers of the Israeli enemy have tried again to advance towards the surroundings of the village of Adaysseh municipality” and “the clashes continue,” Hezbollah said early Saturday in a statement, after having previously assured that it had forced Israeli soldiers to “retreat” in this area.
The armed Shiite movement also claimed to have targeted troops in the Yarun region, in southern Lebanon, with a “salvo of rockets”, as well as soldiers in two places on the Israeli side.
At the same time, a series of explosions was heard in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, according to AFP correspondents. The Israeli army had previously issued evacuation orders for certain areas.
AFP images show smoke rising from the area near the airport.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, the Israeli army carried out particularly intense bombings on the southern suburbs of Beirut, destroying several buildings.
According to the Israeli news site Ynet, these strikes targeted Hachem Safieddine, potential successor to Hassan Nasrallah, in the HQ of Hezbollah’s intelligence services.
” Resistance ”
The escalation in Lebanon comes nearly a year after Hezbollah opened a front against Israel at the start of the Gaza war, followed by months of firefights that displaced tens of thousands of people. residents on both sides of the border.
According to the Lebanese disaster management service, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, including more than a thousand since September 23, the date of the intensification of Israeli bombings. The Lebanese government estimates the number of displaced people at around 1.2 million.
“Resistance in the region will not retreat despite the martyrs,” Ayatollah Khamenei said on Friday in a large mosque in Tehran, in a rare speech on the occasion of weekly prayers.
He judged that the attack on Tehran, which fired some 200 missiles towards Israel on Tuesday, was “the least” of the responses to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah killed on September 27 in an Israeli raid near Beirut , and the death on July 31 of Ismaïl Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, in an explosion in Tehran blamed on Israel.
The attack led to cross-threats of retaliation between Israel and Iran.
American President Joe Biden said on Friday that Israel should “consider other options” than striking oil sites in Iran, after having raised this possibility the day before. He assured “trying to mobilize the rest of the world” to ease regional tensions.
Former American head of state and Republican presidential candidate in November, Donald Trump, on the contrary judged that Israel should “strike” Iranian nuclear facilities.
The US military announced Friday that it had targeted 15 Houthi targets in Yemen, from where the Iran-backed rebels carry out attacks against Israel and ships they consider linked to that country, as well as the United States and in the United Kingdom.
Road cut
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed to have killed 250 Hezbollah fighters and struck more than 2,000 sites since it launched a ground offensive against this movement in southern Lebanon on Monday, where nine of its soldiers died in fighting. .
PHOTO KAWNAT HAJU, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Smoke rises from sites targeted by Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon.
Two others were killed in an overnight drone attack from Iraq on a military base in the Golan, occupied and annexed by Israel, according to Israeli Army Radio.
On Friday, the Israeli army notably carried out a raid in eastern Lebanon, near the Masnaa border post, cutting a vital road axis with neighboring Syria, from where Israel accuses Hezbollah of transporting weapons from the Syria. She said she had struck in particular “an underground tunnel” of Hezbollah.
PHOTO JAAFAR ASHTIYEH, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The Israeli army said Thursday it had “eliminated” a local Hamas leader in an air raid on the Tulkarem refugee camp.
Some 374,000 people, mainly Syrians, have fled to Syria in recent days, according to Lebanese authorities.
A hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut and two in the south announced that they would suspend their activity due to the Israeli strikes.
The Islamic Health Committee, affiliated with Hezbollah, announced that Israeli bombings killed 11 of its rescuers on Friday in southern Lebanon, including seven outside Marjayoun hospital.
Hezbollah had previously accused Israel of having struck “civil defense teams” near Beirut, leaving one dead.