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October 13, 2024 – 9:57 p.m.
(Keystone-ATS) The Israeli army is engaged in close combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon on Sunday, where it announced the capture of an enemy fighter for the first time, and is stepping up airstrikes against the pro-Iranian outfit in the neighboring country.
The Lebanese movement said it was fighting at the end of the afternoon “with automatic weapons” and with “rockets” from Israeli soldiers in at least four villages bordering Israel, with the Israeli army reporting “fights facing face to face” and “wounded soldiers” in its ranks.
Hezbollah released an old sound recording of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, assassinated on September 27 in an Israeli strike near Beirut, where he galvanized fighters on maneuvers.
The army announced that it had captured a fighter from this formation in a tunnel in southern Lebanon, a first since it launched a ground offensive there on September 30.
After weakening the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, Israel moved the front of the war to Lebanon, saying it wanted to allow the return to northern Israel of some 60,000 inhabitants, displaced by the rocket attacks carried out for a year by the Hezbollah in support of Hamas.
Israel will not allow Hezbollah to return to border areas, even after the withdrawal of its soldiers, its Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Sunday.
“Like an earthquake”
According to the official Lebanese news agency ANI, the Israeli air force has also intensified its air strikes and heavy weapons fire on villages in the south since midnight, 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, testified to AFP in the morning in the middle of the smoking rubble.
Nabatiyeh is among the localities in the region where the Israeli army regularly calls on residents to evacuate to the north.
The Lebanese Red Cross reported several rescue workers injured Sunday in a strike in the area, and the Lebanese army reported three soldiers injured by “Israeli strikes on two military vehicles.”
More than 1,200 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched massive bombings there on September 23 against Hezbollah in its strongholds in the south and east, and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, according to a count by the AFP based on official figures.
The UN has recorded nearly 700,000 displaced people.
“Shocking violations”
The UN peace force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, for its part asked for “explanations” from Israel on Sunday, denouncing new maneuvers targeting it, after having denounced on Friday “repeated” Israeli fire on its positions in the south of Lebanon. Lebanon, which raised a diplomatic outcry.
Among these “shocking violations”, she cited the entry “in force” in the morning of two Israeli tanks into one of its positions, before shots which “caused smoke” which triggered “skin irritations and gastro-intestinal reactions”. intestinal disorders in 15 peacekeepers.
The Israeli army then indicated that one of its tanks “which was trying to evacuate wounded soldiers” under enemy fire backed up “and hit a UNIFIL post”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously urged the UN to withdraw UNIFIL from combat zones “immediately”, defying international criticism.
His Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, whose country provides the most troops to UNIFIL, repeated to him on Sunday that “attacking” this force was “unacceptable”.
American anti-missile system
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 October 1.
The Pentagon announced on Sunday the deployment in Israel of an American high-altitude THAAD anti-missile defense system “to help strengthen the air defenses” of the Israeli ally against Tehran.
Iran is “totally ready to face a war situation,” warned its head of diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi, on Sunday.
“No more hope” in Jabalia
In the devastated and besieged Gaza Strip, the Israeli army continues the offensive it relaunched in the north, where it accuses Hamas of seeking to reconstitute its forces.
“There are a lot of dead and people still under the rubble,” Mouhammad Abou Halima, 40, told AFP in the shelled and surrounded town of Jabalia. “For more than a week, there has been no more hope, no more water and no more means of subsistence.”
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.
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.
