The Israeli army, fighting on two fronts, carried out intense strikes on Sunday on the Gaza Strip, killing at least 20 Palestinians according to Civil Defense. It relentlessly bombed a Lebanese Hezbollah stronghold near Beirut international airport.
In Israel, three suspects were arrested after flares were fired on Saturday near the private residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Caesarea (center), who was not there, according to security services. Officials blamed Israel’s anti-Netanyahu protest movement for fueling the attack, and the court banned the suspects’ identities from being published.
Israel says it wants to incapacitate the Lebanese Islamist movements Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, two allies of Iran, its sworn enemy. He vowed to destroy Hamas after the group’s attack on his territory on October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza, and wants to stop Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on his territory from neighboring Lebanon.
In the besieged and ravaged Palestinian territory of Gaza, bombarded daily by the Israeli army for more than a year, at least 20 people, including four women and three children, were killed in strikes according to local Civil Defense.
The deadliest strike, which left ten people dead, targeted a house in Al-Bureij (center), according to the same source. Five people were killed by a ‘missile launched by an Israeli drone’ in Rafah (south) and four – three women and a child – in a strike against a house in Nousseirat (center).
‘Get us out (of Gaza), for God’s sake. Enough war, enough suffering!’, said Itimad Al-Zain, a Palestinian displaced in Gaza City, in the north of the territory threatened by famine according to the UN.
‘We will act’
A powerful armed movement accused by its detractors of constituting a ‘state within a state’, Hezbollah opened a front against the Israeli army in support of Hamas on October 8, 2023. After a year of cross-border violence, Israel moved the main war front in Lebanon, by launching an intense bombing campaign on September 23, mainly against Hezbollah strongholds.
The day after incessant strikes on the southern suburbs, the Israeli army on Sunday called on residents of several neighborhoods to evacuate them, calls immediately followed by raids.
‘You are near Hezbollah-affiliated facilities and interests, against which Israeli forces will act,’ army spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote on X. After successive strikes, a thick cloud white smoke formed above buildings in the southern suburbs.
Strikes targeted the area around a hospital and a residential building near a church, according to the national news agency ANI.
The vast majority of residents of the southern suburbs, 600,000 to 800,000 before the war, fled the devastated area. ‘We’re playing hide and seek,’ says Mehdi Zeïtar bitterly about the evacuation calls. ‘We drive until the strikes end and then we go back.’
The Israeli army also carried out strikes on villages in southern Lebanon, where its troops have been carrying out a ground offensive since September 30.
Rocket fire on Israel
Hezbollah reported nighttime fighting with ‘automatic weapons and rockets’ against soldiers advancing in the Chamaa region about five km from the border.
The only faction to retain its weapons at the end of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), in the name of ‘resistance’ against Israel, Hezbollah, created and financed by Iran, has established itself as an essential political force in the Lebanon.
Despite the hard blows inflicted on Hezbollah, several of whose leaders were killed, the movement said it fired salvos of rockets against northern Israel on Saturday, notably against military bases in and around Haifa.
The army reported around 80 projectiles fired. In Haifa, a synagogue was hit and two civilians injured.
Israel wants to distance Hezbollah from the border regions of southern Lebanon and stop its rocket attacks which have displaced some 60,000 residents of northern Israel.
More than 3,452 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 8, 2023, according to the Ministry of Health, the majority since September 23.
/ATS
