Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned on Friday that his allies, mainly Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, would continue the fight against Israel, which carried out new strikes targeting them in Lebanon and Gaza, amid fears redoubled by a conflagration in the Middle East.
Iran’s allies “will not back down”, said Ayatollah Khamenei in a large mosque in Tehran, in a rare speech during weekly prayers, after the missile attack launched by Iran on Tuesday against Israel.
He was speaking in the midst of a war between Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel, which has turned its forces to the northern front after weakening Palestinian Hamas in the Gaza Strip in a devastating offensive that is still ongoing.
This was launched in response to the unprecedented attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 against Israel.
This attack was “logical and legitimate”, argued the number one of the Islamic Republic of Iran which does not recognize the existence of the State of Israel.
Israel, which “has maintained itself only thanks to American support […] won’t last long,” he said.
“The resistance in the region will not retreat despite the martyrs,” he added in reference to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah killed on September 27 in an Israeli raid near Beirut, and that of ‘Ismaïl Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, died on July 31 in an explosion in Tehran blamed on Israel.
He judged that the attack on Tehran which fired some 200 missiles towards Israel on Tuesday was “the least” of the responses to the assassination of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The attack led to cross-threats of retaliation between Israel and Iran.
American President Joe Biden said on Friday that Israel should “consider other options” than striking oil sites in Iran, after having raised this possibility the day before. He assured that he was “trying to mobilize the rest of the world” to ease regional tensions.
Former American head of state and Republican presidential candidate in November, Donald Trump, for his part ruled that Israel should “strike” Iranian nuclear facilities.
The US military announced Friday that it had targeted 15 Houthi targets in Yemen, from where the Iran-backed rebels carry out attacks against Israel and ships they consider linked to that country, as well as the United States and in the United Kingdom.
Road cut
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed to have killed 250 Hezbollah fighters and struck more than 2,000 sites since it launched a ground offensive against this movement in southern Lebanon on Monday, where nine of its soldiers died in fighting. .
Two others were killed in an overnight drone attack from Iraq on a military base in the Golan, occupied and annexed by Israel, according to Israeli Army Radio.
On Friday, the Israeli army notably carried out a raid in eastern Lebanon, near the Masnaa border post, cutting a vital road axis with neighboring Syria, from where Israel accuses Hezbollah of transporting weapons from the Syria.
She said she had struck in particular “an underground tunnel” of Hezbollah.
Some 374,000 people, mainly Syrians, have fled to Syria in recent days, according to Lebanese authorities.
A hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut and two in the south announced that they would suspend their activity due to the Israeli strikes.
The Islamic Health Committee, affiliated with Hezbollah, announced that Israeli bombings killed 11 of its rescuers on Friday in southern Lebanon, including seven outside Marjayoun hospital.
Hezbollah had previously accused Israel of striking “civil defense teams” near Beirut, killing one person.
200 projectiles
The movement reported clashes and shootings against Israeli soldiers infiltrated on the Lebanese side of the border and shelling and rocket attacks on northern Israel.
The Israeli army recorded around 200 projectiles fired from the neighboring country.
Early Saturday, AFP correspondents heard two explosions and saw smoke rising above Beirut’s southern suburbs, after the Israeli army spokesman called on residents in part from the Burj al-Barajneh district to evacuate the premises.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, the Israeli army carried out particularly intense bombings on the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, destroying several buildings.
According to the Israeli news site Ynet, the strikes targeted Hachem Safieddine, potential successor to Hassan Nasrallah, in the HQ of Hezbollah’s intelligence services.
“Illegal” strike
The escalation in Lebanon comes after nearly a year of firefights that displaced tens of thousands of residents on both sides of the border, after Hezbollah opened a front against Israel early in the war in Gaza.
Israel has launched massive bombings in Lebanon since September 23, targeting hundreds of Hezbollah targets, according to its army.
According to the Lebanese Disaster Management Service, 2,011 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, including more than a thousand since September 23.
The Lebanese government estimates the number of displaced people at around 1.2 million.
The United Nations has also condemned as “illegal” the Israeli raid which left 18 dead the day before in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
This airstrike, carried out according to the army against a local Hamas leader, is the deadliest since 2000 in this territory occupied by Israel since 1967, where violence has flared since the start of the war in Gaza, according to a source within the Palestinian security services.
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