Israel has announced additional troops are to join its ground invasion into southern Lebanon and has vowed to retaliate after Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at targets across Israel.
In a message posted to its official Telegram channel, the Israel Defence Forces said additional forces are joining “raids on Hizbullah terror targets and terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon that began on Monday”.
Israel’s military has also issued another order stating residents in 24 Lebanese villages should leave their homes to avoid being attacked.
Officials in Israel said it will launch a “significant retaliation” to Tuesday’s missile attack by Iran within days that could target oil production facilities inside Iran and other strategic sites.
In Lebanon, Israel launched strikes across Beirut’s southern suburbs in the early hours of Wednesday. The strikes came hours after Iran’s missile attacks, in an intensification of a conflict that some fear could escalate into a regional war.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu told a meeting of his security cabinet that “Iran made a big mistake tonight – and it will pay for it.”
In its attack on Tuesday, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles, Israel’s government said. No injuries were reported in Israel, but one man was killed in the occupied West Bank, authorities there said.
Late on Tuesday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran’s action was “concluded unless Israeli regime decides to invite further retaliation”. In a statement on X, he said: “Israel’s enablers now have a heightened responsibility to rein in the warmongers in Tel Aviv instead of getting involved in their folly.”
The Kremlin on Wednesday said the situation in the Middle East was developing in an alarming direction and called on all sides to exercise restraint.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia had contacts with all sides in the region and said Moscow condemned any action that caused the death of civilians.
Spain plans to send two military aircraft to evacuate as many as 350 citizens from Lebanon as early as Thursday, Spanish defence minister Margarita Robles said on Wednesday.
A group of 350 Spanish citizens in Lebanon have asked to go to Spain, Ms Robles said in an interview.
Foreign minister José Manuel Albares had said earlier this week around 1,000 Spaniards were in Lebanon.
The Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed by an Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday. Israeli air strikes on Lebanon have killed about 1,000 people and wounded 6,000 more in the past couple of weeks, with one million people said to be displaced from their homes.
Elsewhere, Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that 40 civilians have been killed in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, where Israel continues its military campaign against Hamas.
It said medical teams recovered the bodies of 40 people, most of them children and women, and dozens of causalities after a ground incursion and air strikes.
At least nine Palestinians were killed and 20 injured in an Israeli air strike on a school and institute housing displaced people in Gaza, according to a report from Wafa. – Guardian