Israel strikes Lebanon after Iran ally Hezbollah fires missiles over border
“Israel launched airstrikes on Hezbollah-dominated areas in Beirut and southern Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s missile and drone attacks. The strikes, which killed at least 31 people, were in response to Hezbollah’s actions following the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The conflict has escalated, drawing Lebanon into the broader US-Israeli war with Iran.
Conflict spreads as militant group targets Israel over Ali Khamenei killing and IDF responds with Beirut strikes
Israel has carried out heavy airstrikes on the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut after the Iran-backed Lebanese group launched missiles and drones towards Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Residents of Beirut were woken by the sounds of about a dozen blasts at 3am as Israel struck three different locations in the south of Lebanon’s capital. Bombings continued into the late hours of the morning, with the area almost entirely deserted by the time of a strike at around noon.
The explosions rocked windows around the city and were heard from miles away. People heard warplanes and bombs being dropped as airstrikes were carried out over wide swathes of the south of the country, collapsing buildings in villages near Tyre.
At least 31 people were killed 149 injured in the strikes, in what Lebanon’s health ministry said was a preliminary toll.
Lebanon is the latest country sucked into the US-Israeli war with Iran, which in its third day has expanded to much of the Middle East. Iran continued to attack Gulf Arab states, with a drone hitting an Aramco oil refinery in Saudi Arabia on Monday morning. Overnight, a drone hit a UK military base in Cyprus – the first time that Iranian strikes have affected an EU state.
The senior Iranian official Ali Larijani said Iran did not want to attack states in the region but that it would continue to target them as long as they hosted US bases that were being used for staging grounds for attacks against Iran.
The US president, Donald Trump, who announced the start of the war against Iran as an operation aimed at regime change, gave contradictory statements over whether or not there could be a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict.
Initially telling the Atlantic on Sunday that he was “ready to talk”, he seemed to later harden his position and in a video released on his Truth Social platform he said the fighting would continue until all objectives were achieved, vowing to “avenge” US troops killed so far.
Larijani, in a brief post on X, said: “We will not negotiate with the United States.”
It is unclear how deep the involvement of Hezbollah will be in the Iran war, as the Lebanese state seeks to restrain it from further involving the country in the regional conflict.
Hezbollah said in a statement it had launched a barrage of missiles and drones at the Mishmar al-Karmel missile defence facility near Haifa at around midnight in “retaliation” for the killing of Khamenei and “in defence of Lebanon and its people”.
Israel responded just a few hours later, hitting what it described as Hezbollah targets across south Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and the Beirut suburb of Dahieh. The Israeli military claimed the strikes on Dahieh had killed several senior Hezbollah officers.
“Hezbollah opened a campaign against Israel overnight and is fully responsible for any escalation. Any enemy that threatens our security will pay a heavy price,” the chief of the Israeli military, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, said in a statement.
An Israeli military spokesperson issued evacuation orders for 55 different villages and towns across Lebanon, warning people to get at least a kilometre away as they were near “Hezbollah operatives and facilities”. Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military announced the deployment of 100,000 reservists, many of them along the border with Lebanon.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, said that thus far Israeli troops had not entered Lebanese territory, but were “prepared to do so” if necessary. The goal of the campaign was to “degrade the capabilities of the group”.
Streams of people began to flee Dahieh by car and by foot, and lines of cars began to form outside petrol stations in the southern city of Tyre as residents began to head northwards. The highways from Dahieh into the centre of the capital were gridlocked with scooters and cars driving over rubble and debris from the earlier strikes. In the south, people drove northwards on both sides of the highway.
Videos showed the tops of buildings in Dahieh engulfed in flames, while burnt out husks of cars lay at the feet of the crumpled buildings. As they scrambled to flee, witnesses reported seeing rocket barrages flying from south Lebanon towards Israel, in what seemed to be Hezbollah artillery volleys.
The memory of the 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah that ended in 2024 loomed large in the minds of Lebanese. Fears spread quickly that Dahieh, the Bekaa valley and large parts of the south could be rendered uninhabitable as it was then. Israeli bombed those areas daily during the war and nearly 4,000 people were killed and a million displaced.
In the early hours of Monday, families and friends quickly devised plans for what they should do and tried to understand what exactly was happening, as the number of displaced people from affected areas in Lebanon grew.
Dozens of schools in the capital opened their doors to shelter the displaced families, while crowds of people sat in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut.
Lebanon’s government quickly condemned Hezbollah’s decision to bomb Israel without consulting the state. Without naming the militant group by name, the Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said he would “not allow the country to be dragged into new adventures”.
“The rocket fire from southern Lebanon is an irresponsible and suspicious act that jeopardises Lebanon’s security and safety and provides Israel with pretexts to continue its aggression,” Salam said in a post on X.
For weeks, Lebanese officials had scrambled to prevent Hezbollah from joining any potential war in Iran, as Israel passed messages to its Lebanese counterparts that any attack would draw a wide-ranging response against the entire country.“
No comments:
Post a Comment