(Beirut) Lebanese Hezbollah on Monday threatened Israel with further attacks if its offensive in Lebanon continues, after a drone strike targeting a military position south of Haifa killed four Israeli soldiers and injured more than 60 people.
It was the deadliest strike in Israel since the Lebanese armed Shiite movement and Israel entered into open war on September 23.
In a statement, Hezbollah, supported by Iran and ally of Palestinian Hamas, “promises the enemy” that the attack “south of Haifa is only a foretaste of what awaits it” “he decides to continue his attacks against our people.” The Israeli army reported four soldiers killed and seven soldiers injured at a Golani brigade training camp in Binyamina, south of Haifa, a large city in northern Israel.
According to United Hatzalah, a volunteer rescue organization, the attack injured more than 60 people, with “varying degrees of injuries: critical, serious, moderate and minor.”
Earlier, pro-Iranian Hezbollah announced that its fighters had fired “a squadron of explosive drones” at this training camp, dedicating this attack to its leader Hassan Nasrallah, assassinated on September 27 in an Israeli strike near Beirut. .
In a new press release on Monday, Hezbollah welcomed a “complex operation”. He explains that he simultaneously launched dozens of missiles at various targets in the Nahariya and Acre regions with the aim of “distracting Israeli air defense systems”. The drones “managed to bypass air defense radars and reach their target in [le] training camp,” according to Hezbollah.
“Face to face fights”
On Sunday afternoon, the Shiite movement claimed to be fighting Israeli soldiers “with automatic weapons” and “rockets” in at least four villages bordering Israel, and to have ambushed soldiers who tried to attack them. infiltrate, with the Israeli army reporting “face-to-face fighting”.
The Israeli army, for its part, announced that it had captured a Hezbollah fighter in a tunnel in southern Lebanon, a first since it launched a ground offensive there on September 30.
After having weakened the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, Israel moved the front of the war to Lebanon, saying it wanted to allow the return to the north of the country of some 60,000 inhabitants, displaced by the rocket attacks carried out for a year by Hezbollah in support for Hamas.
Across the border, the Health Ministry announced Sunday that 51 people had been killed the day before in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, bringing the country’s death toll since September 23 to more than 1,300, according to an AFP count.
“Like an earthquake”
According to the official Lebanese news agency ANI, Israeli aircraft intensified their strikes on villages in southern Lebanon on Sunday, after hitting a market in the town of Nabatiyeh on Saturday evening.
“Everything was destroyed […] as if an earthquake had ravaged the market,” a resident, Tareq Sadaq, told AFP in the middle of the smoking rubble.
The UN has recorded nearly 700,000 displaced people since September 23.
PHOTO MOHAMMAD ZAATARI, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hezbollah rescue workers use an excavator to remove rubble from buildings destroyed Saturday evening by Israeli airstrikes, in the town of Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon, October 13, 2024.
“Shocking violations”
The UN peace force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, for its part denounced “shocking violations” by Israel against its positions, after criticizing “repeated” Israeli fire targeting them in southern Lebanon on Friday, raising a diplomatic outcry .
She reported a “forceful” entry on Sunday morning of two Israeli tanks into one of its positions, before shots “caused smoke” which triggered “skin irritations and gastrointestinal reactions in 15 peacekeepers” .
The Israeli army said that one of its tanks “which was trying to evacuate wounded soldiers” “hit a UNIFIL post”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously urged the UN to withdraw UNIFIL “immediately” from the combat zones.
“Attacks” against UN peacekeepers may constitute “war crimes”, the spokesperson for the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, warned on Sunday.
PHOTO AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Vehicles from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon patrol in Marjayoun, southern Lebanon, October 12, 2024.
Tensions with Iran
The war in Lebanon and that of Gaza, triggered by the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, is coupled with an escalation between Iran and Israel, whose leaders are threatening to retaliate to a Iranian missile attack on 1er october.
The Pentagon announced on Sunday the deployment in Israel of an American high-altitude THAAD anti-missile defense system in support against Tehran.
Iran is “totally ready to face a war situation,” warned its head of diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi, on Sunday.
Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian discussed by telephone with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Sunday how to secure a “ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel” and “end the genocide […] in Gaza and Lebanon,” according to a press release from his services.
Mr. Macron stressed “Iran’s responsibility to support a general de-escalation”, according to the French presidency.
PHOTO MURTAJA LATEEF, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Abbas Araghchi, head of diplomacy of Iran
Strike on school in Gaza
In the devastated and besieged Gaza Strip, local Civil Defense said Sunday evening that an Israeli bombardment on a school transformed into a shelter for displaced people had killed at least 15 people, “including children” and “entire families” in the Nousseirat camp (center). The attack also left “50 injured”, according to this organization.
The Israeli military said it was “reviewing information” on the matter.
The Israeli army regularly accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where thousands of Gazans have sought refuge, an accusation denied by the Palestinian Islamist movement.
The army said on Sunday that it had eliminated “dozens” of fighters in the area, where more than 400,000 people are trapped, according to the UN.
A joint mission of the WHO and the Palestinian Red Cross succeeded on Saturday in evacuating patients and supplying two hospitals in the north of the Gaza Strip, the head of the WHO said on the social network X on Sunday.
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people in Israel, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures and including hostages who died or were killed in captivity in Gaza.
At least 42,227 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians, in the Israeli retaliatory offensive in Gaza, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.