Hamas announced that one of its commanders, his wife and two of their daughters were killed Saturday in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon, the first in this region since the start of the war in Gaza, triggered by the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023.
As the first anniversary of this attack approaches, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, warned Friday that his allies, mainly Hezbollah and Hamas, would continue the fight against Israel, accentuating fears of a conflagration in the Middle East. -East.
In southern Lebanon, “Israeli enemy soldiers tried again to advance towards the surroundings of the village of Adaysseh” and “the clashes continue,” Hezbollah said early Saturday in a statement. , after having assured that he had forced the Israeli soldiers to “retreat” in this area.
The powerful movement also claimed to have targeted troops in the Yarun region also in the south, with a “salvo of rockets” as well as soldiers in two places on the Israeli side.
Explosions in Beirut suburbs
At the same time, a series of explosions shook the southern suburbs of Beirut, from where AFP images showed columns of smoke rising from the area near the airport. The Israeli army had previously issued evacuation orders for certain areas there.
During the night from Thursday to Friday, the Israeli army carried out particularly intense bombings on the southern suburbs of the capital, destroying several buildings.
According to the Israeli news site Ynet, these strikes targeted, in the HQ of Hezbollah’s intelligence services, Hachem Safieddine, potential successor at the head of the movement of Hassan Nasrallah, killed on September 27 in an Israeli raid near Beirut.
“Résistance”
The escalation in Lebanon comes nearly a year after Hezbollah opened a front against Israel at the start of the Gaza war, followed by months of firefights that displaced tens of thousands of people. residents on both sides of the border.
According to the Lebanese disaster management service, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, including more than a thousand since September 23, the date of the launch of massive Israeli bombings aimed, according to the army, at targets in Hezbollah. The Lebanese government estimates the number of displaced people at around 1.2 million.
“Resistance in the region will not retreat despite the martyrs,” Ayatollah Khamenei said on Friday in a large mosque in Tehran, in a rare speech on the occasion of weekly prayers.
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 Hassan Nasrallah, and to the death on July 31 of Ismaïl Haniyeh, the leader of the Hamas, in an explosion in Tehran blamed on Israel. 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 tensions.
The former American head of state and Republican presidential candidate in November, Donald Trump, advocated Israeli strikes on 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 to 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 in southern Lebanon on Monday, where nine of its soldiers died in fighting.
The United Nations Interim Force (UNIFIL) deployed along the border between Israel and Lebanon said on Saturday that it had declined a request made by the army to “move some” of its positions.
Two other Israeli soldiers 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 hit “an underground tunnel” of Hezbollah there.
Some 374,000 people, mainly Syrians, have fled to Syria in recent days, according to the Lebanese authorities.
At least four hospitals in Lebanon, including one near the southern suburbs of Beirut, announced on Friday that they were suspending their activities due to Israeli strikes, which according to rescuers affiliated with Hezbollah, killed 11 of their members in the south of the country. .
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