Israel said it carried out 150 strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Monday and warned the population of “wider” bombings, despite calls for restraint from the international community.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern on Sunday that Lebanon could become “another Gaza”, nearly a year after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023.
For the first time, the Israeli army advised Lebanese citizens early Monday to “stay away from targets” of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, adding that strikes targeting the Islamist movement would “continue in the near future” and that they would be “more significant and more precise.”
Monday’s strikes, the most intense targeting Hezbollah since the start of the war, targeted southern and eastern Lebanon, AFP correspondents said, sending up thick mushroom clouds of smoke.
The Israeli army said it carried out about 150 strikes on Hezbollah targets at dawn.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati has denounced “a plan to destroy” his country.
The official Lebanese news agency ANI reported that the Israeli air force had launched “more than 80 airstrikes in half an hour” targeting areas in southern Lebanon, at the same time as “intense raids in the Bekaa Valley” in the east, where a civilian and a Hezbollah fighter were killed.
“We are now living under the bombings, we go to bed and wake up with them,” Wafaa Ismail, a 60-year-old housewife, told AFP from her village of Zaoutar in southern Lebanon.
According to ANI, Lebanese “in Beirut and several regions” have received calls to evacuate from Israel on their landlines. The office of Information Minister Ziad Makari, located in a neighborhood with several ministries in Beirut, told AFP that it had received such a call.
“When the minister’s assistant answered, she heard a recorded message asking [au personnel] to evacuate the building or risk it being bombed,” the source said.
The minister denounced the “psychological war” that he said Israel was waging.
After almost a year of war in the Gaza Strip, the front has shifted to northern Israel and the border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire are intensifying between the powerful Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and supported by Iran, and the Israeli army.
Hezbollah has vowed to continue attacking Israel “until the end of the aggression in Gaza.”
“Message to Hezbollah”
Israel says it wants to allow the return to the north of the country of tens of thousands of residents who fled because of Hezbollah’s gunfire, which has been almost daily since the start of the war in Gaza.
“We are determined to ensure that the people of the north can return home safely,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
“We have inflicted on Hezbollah a series of blows that it could never have imagined,” he added, speaking for the first time on this subject since the attacks, attributed to Israel, against the Lebanese movement’s transmission devices and an Israeli strike that decapitated its elite unit, Friday near Beirut.
“We will reach out to anyone who threatens the citizens of Israel,” warned the chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi. This is “a message to Hezbollah, the Middle East and beyond.”
“Threats will not stop us: we are ready for all military scenarios” against Israel, declared Hezbollah’s number two, Naim Qassem, on Sunday, announcing “a new phase” in the battle against Israel.
According to the army, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to take refuge in shelters in the north, where schools are closed until Monday.
The exchanges of fire have intensified since the wave of spectacular explosions of Hezbollah transmission devices which left 39 dead and 2,931 wounded on Tuesday and Wednesday in the movement’s strongholds in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.
On Friday, an Israeli strike on a building in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed 16 members of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, including its leader, Ibrahim Aqil. The raid left 45 people dead in total, including civilians, according to Lebanese authorities.
“On the brink of disaster”
Faced with this spiral, the United States, Israel’s main ally, “urged” its nationals to leave Lebanon.
“We will do everything we can to prevent a broader war from breaking out,” President Joe Biden said.
China on Monday called on its citizens to leave Israel “as soon as possible”
“The region is on the brink of imminent catastrophe,” said the UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert.
Egypt has said it fears an “all-out war” in the Middle East, warning that the escalation between Israel and Hezbollah could undermine efforts for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
In nearly a year, violence between Israel and Hezbollah has left hundreds dead in Lebanon, mainly fighters, and dozens dead in Israel and the occupied Golan.
The war in the Gaza Strip broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack in southern Israel that killed 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 Gaza.
Of the 251 people abducted, 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 been in power in Gaza since 2007 and which it considers a terrorist organisation, along with the United States and the European Union.
His army has launched an offensive in Gaza that has so far killed at least 41,431 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s health ministry, which the UN considers reliable. It has also caused a humanitarian disaster there.