Israel criticized by Europeans following shots that injured four UNIFIL peacekeepers in Lebanon

Israel claimed, Friday October 11, to have fired in the direction of a « menace » near a United Nations Interim Force (UNIFIL) position in southern Lebanon, where two peacekeepers were injured, an incident that sparked international criticism.

The Israeli army, which has been carrying out a vast air and land offensive against Hezbollah, an ally of Palestinian Hamas, since the end of September, has claimed to have fired in the direction of a « menace » close to the position of UNIFIL and accused the pro-Iranian movement of endangering “deliberately” UNIFIL soldiers, four of whom were injured in two days.

UNIFIL reported that its headquarters in Ras Al-Naqoura suffered damage on Friday “explosions for the second time in forty-eight hours” et “two Sri Lankan peacekeepers were injured”after two Indonesian soldiers on Thursday.

In addition, “Israeli tanks advanced” et “an Israeli army bulldozer brought down sections of the protective wall” of a UN position in the village of Labbouneh, added UNIFIL, denouncing the “very high risk” what the Israeli army is doing to the peacekeepers.

Strong international condemnations

The Israeli army has “expressed serious concern about incidents of this kind” and said “conduct a thorough examination (…) to establish the details of what happened”.

The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, judged “completely unacceptable” that the UN peacekeepers are “deliberately targeted by the Israeli armed forces”. At a summit in Cyprus of the leaders of the Mediterranean countries of the European Union, he warned that France “will not tolerate[it] not “ new shots. He further considered that “stop arms exports” used in Gaza and Lebanon was “the only lever” to put an end to the conflicts raging there.

The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, and his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, also judged that these shots were not “not acceptable”. The Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, described the Israeli fire as “violation of international humanitarian law”. Joe Biden added his voice to the criticism on Friday. To the question “Are you asking Israel to stop hitting UN peacekeepers? »the President of the United States responded: ” Absolutely. » The ten non-permanent member countries of the UN Security Council expressed their “deep concern” after these attacks and “stressed that any deliberate attack against peacekeeping forces [étaient] a serious violation of international humanitarian law”.

2,100 people killed in one year of war in Lebanon

While Israel has been celebrating Yom Kippur, an important Jewish holiday, since Friday evening, air raid sirens sounded late in the afternoon in the northwest of the country, with the Israeli army reporting« environ 80 projectiles » taken from Lebanon, then in the evening north of Tel Aviv after the« intrusion » of two drones, one of them having been “intercepted”.

Hezbollah on Friday called on Israelis to move away from military sites located in residential areas in the north of the country: “The army of the Israeli enemy is using the houses (…) as assembly centers for its officers and soldiers” in several regions of northern Israel and “has military bases” in the main northern cities like “Haifa, Tiberias, Acre” notably.

Since October 2023, when Hezbollah opened a front against Israel in support of Hamas, more than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon, including more than 1,200 since September 23, according to a count from Agence France-Presse based on official figures. The UN has recorded nearly 700,000 displaced people inside Lebanon, with around 400,000 people fleeing, most of them to Syria.

On the Israeli border, the Lebanese army announced the death of two soldiers on Friday, bringing to four the number of Lebanese soldiers killed since the start of the intensification of Israeli bombings on Lebanon. And the official Lebanese agency ANI reported several Israeli strikes on the south and in the Baalbek region.

Hezbollah claimed to have bombarded Israeli troops along the border as well as in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights and fired rockets towards northern Israel.

The day after the deadliest Israeli strikes on Beirut since three weeks of war between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, called on Friday the UN to adopt a resolution for a “total and immediate ceasefire”.

These strikes, which left 22 dead and 117 injured, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, were aimed “the head of Hezbollah’s security apparatus Wafic Safa”according to the Israeli press and a source close to the group at AFP. This is the third time that the Israeli army has directly targeted the capital, with Israel concentrating its strikes on the southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s special envoy, said Friday that Washington was working “relentlessly” for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “We want the whole conflict to endhe told Lebanese television channel LBCI from Washington. We are working tirelessly on this subject. » He also judged “unacceptable” the shooting against UNIFIL as well as the strikes which killed twenty-two people in Beirut. “We are trying to stop these bombings. We do not like this bombing campaign in a densely populated city like Beirut”declared M. Hochstein.

New Nobel Peace Prize winner compares Gaza to post-war Japan

After a year of fighting in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, Israel has concentrated most of its operations on the Lebanese front. But the Israeli army, which announced the death of a soldier in the Palestinian territory on Friday, has been shelling the north of the Gaza Strip since Sunday and surrounding the town of Jabaliya, where it accuses Hamas of reconstituting its forces.

The situation in the besieged Palestinian territory “is like Japan eighty years ago”devastated by bombs at the end of World War II, the co-president of Nihon Hidankyo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning survivors’ organization of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, said Friday.

The war in Gaza was triggered on October 7, 2023 by the Hamas attack, which led to the death of 1,206 people in Israel, the majority civilians, according to a count by Agence France-Presse based on official Israeli figures and includes hostages who died or were killed in captivity in Gaza. At least 42,126 Palestinians were killed, the majority civilians, in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to data from the Hamas government’s health ministry, unverifiable from independent sources but deemed reliable by the United Nations. Almost all of Gazans’ 2.4 million people have been displaced.