Keystone-SDA
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October 3, 2024 – 08:47
(Keystone-ATS) Israel continued its offensive in Lebanon during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, with 17 air raids on Beirut and its southern suburbs, according to the official Lebanese agency NNA. One of them hit a Hezbollah relief center, killing at least six people.
The Israeli army also issued a new evacuation order overnight for the Shiite sectors of Haret Hreik, Bourj al-Barajneh and Hadath Gharb, in the south of the Lebanese capital.
Israeli forces, whose bombings against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon have left hundreds dead over the past week, also killed three people on Wednesday in Damascus, Syria, including the son-in-law of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, himself assassinated by Israel on September 27 in the suburbs of Beirut, an NGO said.
« Hassan Jaafar al-Qasir […] is one of the two Lebanese victims of the Israeli raid which targeted an apartment in a residential building in the Mazzé district of Damascus,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO close to the rebels.
A source close to Hezbollah confirmed this information and clarified that Hassan Jaafar al-Qasir was the brother of Jaafar al-Qasir, responsible for the transfer of weapons from Iran to Lebanon, whom Israel announced it had killed on Tuesday in a strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Overwhelmed hospitals
Iran launched its second direct attack against Israel on Tuesday, followed by threats of cross-retaliation between the two countries. The military escalation between Israel on the one hand, Iran and Hezbollah on the other, raises fears that the situation in the Middle East could spiral out of control, a year after the attack carried out by Palestinian Hamas, an ally of Hezbollah , on Israeli soil, which started the war in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.
The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned on the social network X that Lebanese hospitals were “overwhelmed with injured patients”. “The health system has been weakened by successive crises and is struggling to cope with the immense needs,” he added.
According to the Lebanese crisis center, more than 1,928 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023.
Since mid-September, Israel has intensified its military operations on the northern front, in order to weaken Hezbollah and allow the return of tens of thousands of inhabitants of the border regions with Lebanon, displaced by rocket fire from the Lebanese movement, incessant for a year.
