Hundreds of thousands of residents fled to shelters and schools closed Sunday in northern Israel, where gunfire between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Israeli army intensified further, pushing the Middle East to the brink of “catastrophe,” according to the UN.
After almost a year of war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas, the front has moved in recent days to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, in the midst of a military escalation between the army and the powerful Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and supported by Iran.
Early Sunday, the Israeli military announced that it was carrying out strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, after the Islamist movement fired on populated areas in northern Israel, reaching the area around the major city of Haifa.
“There was an alarm and immediately after a big explosion, a very, very big explosion,” Achiya Itschaky, a resident of the village of Kiryat Bialik, where the shooting set houses and cars on fire, told AFP.
“It’s war, it’s not pleasant for anyone,” added Sharon Hacmishvili, another resident of the village.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to take refuge in air raid shelters in northern Israel,” army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told AFP.
He said the Israeli army had struck a series of targets since Saturday, “in order to prevent a larger-scale attack.”
The Israeli passive defense ordered the closure of all schools until Monday 6:00 p.m. in the northern regions of the country, some of which are located up to 80 kilometers from the Lebanese border.
According to the army, “around 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones” were fired towards Israel during the night, most of them from Lebanon towards the north of the country, “without causing significant damage”.
Hezbollah said it had targeted Israeli military production facilities “in an initial response” to deadly explosions of its transmission devices across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday.
He announced that he had targeted in particular with “dozens of rockets” of the Fadi-1 and Fadi-2 type the “base and airport of Ramat David”, located deep in Israeli soil, approximately 45 kilometers from the border.
The backlash…
“We are under increasing pressure from Hezbollah and vice versa. In Haifa, many schools are closed and offices are empty. It reminds me of October 7, when everyone stayed at home,” Patrice Wolff, a resident of the city, told AFP, referring to the bloody attack carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war.
Lebanese authorities announced on Sunday that an “Israeli strike” had left one person dead near the border.
The exchanges of fire have increased since the wave of spectacular explosions of Hezbollah transmission devices, attributed to Israel, which left 39 dead and 2,931 injured in the movement’s strongholds in Lebanon, according to the country’s authorities.
Israel has never commented on these attacks.
Then on Friday, an Israeli strike on a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut dealt a new blow to Hezbollah, decapitating its elite force, the Radwan unit, killing 16 members.
Among them were Ibrahim Aqil, the unit’s chief, whose funeral is scheduled for Sunday, and Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi, who was in charge of military operations until earlier this year.
The strike left 45 dead in total, including civilians, according to Lebanese authorities.
“As the region teeters on the brink of imminent catastrophe, we cannot say it enough: there is NO military solution to make either side safer,” UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert warned on Sunday.
In Iraq, pro-Iranian armed groups claimed responsibility for drone strikes on Israel on Sunday, which for its part announced that it had intercepted “several suspicious flying objects” coming from Iraq.
The escalation on the Israeli-Lebanese border prompted Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati to cancel his trip to the UN in New York, calling for “an end to the terrible Israeli massacres.”
Faced with “the unpredictable nature of the ongoing conflict”, the United States “urged” its nationals on Saturday to leave Lebanon.
A ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is essential!
After all attempts at mediation to impose a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip failed, Israel announced on Tuesday that it was extending its war objectives to the northern front, that is to say the border with Lebanon, to allow the return home of tens of thousands of residents displaced by the violence.
The main objectives stated so far were the destruction of Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007 and considered a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States and the European Union, and the return of the hostages held in the Palestinian territory.
“Our goals are clear and our actions speak for themselves,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after Friday’s strike.
The day before, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had warned that “Lebanon’s front with Israel would remain open until the end of the aggression in Gaza.”
The war in the Gaza Strip broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas commandos carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures that include hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
Of the 251 people abducted during the attack, 97 are still being held in Gaza, 33 of whom have been declared dead by the army.
At least 41,391 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli retaliatory offensive on the Gaza Strip, the majority of them civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s health ministry in Gaza, deemed reliable by the UN.
