Israel said it had targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hizbullah in Lebanon overnight and was assessing the damage on Friday after a series of strikes on senior figures in the group that Iran’s supreme leader dismissed as counterproductive.
The air attack on Beirut, part of a wide assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes, was reported to have targeted the potential successor to the leader of Hizbullah assassinated by Israel week ago. Hashem Safieddine’s fate was unclear and neither Israel nor Hizbullah have offered any comment.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told a huge crowd in Tehran that Iran and its regional allies would not back down, two days after Tehran raised the stakes when it fired missiles at Israel, which sent ground forces into Lebanon this week.
In Gaza, Israeli military strikes across the coastal strip killed at least 29 Palestinians on Friday, medics said, and sirens blared in southern Israel in response to renewed rocket fire from militants in the Palestinian enclave.
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The new rocket salvoes indicated that Hamas-led militant factions in Gaza are still able to fire projectiles into Israel despite a year-long Israeli aerial and ground offensive that has turned wide areas of the enclave into wasteland.
And in the West Bank, the ruins of a coffee shop in the city of Tulkarm on Friday showed the force of an Israeli air strike on Thursday night that killed at least 18 people including a senior local commander of Hamas.
The strike in Tulkarm refugee camp, one of the most densely populated in the occupied West Bank, destroyed the ground floor shop entirely, leaving rescue workers picking through piles of concrete with the smell of blood still hanging in the air.
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The Israeli military has said its ground operations in Lebanon are “localised” in villages near the border, but it has not specified how far into Lebanon its ground forces would advance or how long the operation is expected to last.
Iran’s missile salvo was partly in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hizbullah secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a dominant figure who had turned the group into a powerful armed and political force with reach across the Middle East.
Israel has vowed to respond and oil prices have risen on the possibility of an attack on Iran’s oil facilities as Israel pursues its goals of pushing back Hizbullah militants in Lebanon and eliminating their Hamas allies in Gaza.
“The resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders,” ayatollah Khamenei said in a rare appearance leading Friday prayers in Tehran, mentioning Nasrallah in his speech and calling Iran’s attack on Israel legal and legitimate.
Iran will not “procrastinate nor act hastily to carry out its duty” in confronting Israel, he said, without issuing a direct new threat to Israel or the United States but grasping the barrel of a rifle that stood to his left.
The semi-official Iranian news agency SNN quoted Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Ali Fadavi as saying on Friday that if Israel attacks, Tehran would in turn target Israeli energy and gas installations.
Axios reporter Barak Ravid cited three Israeli officials as saying that Hizbullah official Safieddine, rumoured to be Nasrallah’s successor, had been targeted in an underground bunker in Beirut overnight but that his fate was not clear.
Israeli Lieu Co Nadav Shoshani said on Friday afternoon the military was still assessing the damage caused by air strikes in southern Beirut on Thursday night, which he said targeted Hizbullah’s intelligence headquarters.
Earlier the Israeli military reported that it had killed the head of Hizbullah’s communication networks, Mohammad Rashid Sakafi. It declined to comment on the report that Mr Safieddine was targeted.
Hizbullah made no comment on the fate of Mr Sakafi or Mr Safieddine, whose brother Sayyed Abdallah Safieddine is Hizbullah’s representative to Iran.
In Hizbullah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs, many buildings have been reduced to rubble by a week of intensive strikes on the area. Along a main market street, known as Moawad Souk, nearly all the storefronts had been damaged and the street was filled with broken glass.
Israeli strikes have increasingly targeted medical facilities and aid workers. A strike late on Wednesday hit a building in central Beirut used by Hizbullah-affiliated rescue workers, killing nine, the Lebanese health ministry said.
On Friday, an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs killed a rescuer from the same unit and another on the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun hit near its main hospital. Medical staff have decided to temporarily evacuate, said the hospital director Mounes Klakesh.
Israel accuses the militants of hiding among civilians, which Hizbullah denies. – Reuters