Criticizing “shocking violations”, she also accused the Israeli army of having prevented her from carrying out a “crucial logistical movement” the day before.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had just urged the UN Secretary General to put UNIFIL “sheltered (…) immediately”, after denunciations on Friday by this force of “repeated” Israeli fire ” and “deliberates” on its positions in southern Lebanon, which have placed Israel under the fire of international criticism.
The UN, with which Israel maintains terrible relations, has raised its voice at a time when the Israeli army is intensifying its strikes in Lebanon, and fighting on the ground against Hezbollah.
The pro-Iranian Lebanese movement said it was fighting Israeli soldiers “with automatic weapons” and “rockets” on Sunday in at least four villages bordering Israel, with the Israeli army reporting “face-to-face fighting”.
It reported capturing a fighter from this formation in a tunnel in southern Lebanon, where it launched a ground offensive on September 30.
After having weakened the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, Israel moved the front of the war to Lebanon, with the objective of moving Hezbollah away from the border and allowing the return to northern Israel of some 60,000 inhabitants, displaced by the rocket attacks, carried out for a year by the Lebanese formation in support of Hamas.
The country will not allow Hezbollah to return to border areas, even after the withdrawal of its soldiers, its Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Sunday.
Since the launch on September 23 of massive strikes against Hezbollah strongholds, in the southern suburbs of Beirut and the south and east of Lebanon, the Israeli army has decapitated its leadership, notably killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The war in Lebanon and that of Gaza, triggered by the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, is coupled with an escalation between Iran and Israel, whose leaders are threatening to retaliate to a Iranian missile attack on October 1.
Tehran has “no red lines” to defend its interests, and is “totally ready to face a war situation”, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned on Sunday during a visit to Baghdad.
UNIFIL denounced on Friday “repeated” and “deliberate” Israeli fire on its positions in southern Lebanon, subsequently reporting five peacekeepers injured in 48 hours.
“We regret that the UNIFIL soldiers were injured and are doing everything… to prevent this from happening again. But the simplest and most obvious way… is simply to get them out from the danger zone,” the Israeli Prime Minister said.
Defying international criticism, he stressed that his country had requested “repeatedly”, in vain, the withdrawal of UNIFIL from the combat zones, and judged that the refusal of the UN to evacuate them by making “hostages of the Hezbollah.”
Pope Francis called on Sunday to “respect” these peace troops, with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati denouncing “a new (Israeli) refusal to comply with international law”.
Since October 2023, more than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon, including more than 1,200 since September 23, according to an AFP count based on official figures. The UN has recorded nearly 700,000 displaced people.
In the south of the country, an Israeli strike targeted a market in the town of Nabatiyeh on Saturday evening, according to the official Lebanese news agency ANI.
Between the walls of collapsed stores, the columns of acrid smoke and the mountains of charred debris, rescuers were still working on Sunday morning.
“It’s as if an earthquake had devastated the market,” resident Tareq Sadaq told AFP, “everything was destroyed.”
Nabatiyeh is among the localities in the region where the Israeli army regularly calls on residents to evacuate to the north.
The Lebanese Red Cross, for its part, reported several rescue workers injured in an Israeli strike on a house in the south.
In the devastated and besieged Gaza Strip, the Israeli army continues the offensive it relaunched in the north, mainly shelling the Jabalia region, where it accuses Hamas of seeking to reconstitute its forces.
On Sunday, she said she had eliminated “dozens” of fighters there. According to Mr. Netanyahu, the army is “dismantling Hamas strongholds” in the area.
Hamas condemned a “criminal military campaign” in the area.
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people in Israel, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures and including hostages who died or were killed in captivity in Gaza.
At least 42,227 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians, in the Israeli retaliatory offensive in Gaza, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.
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