An Israeli strike hit Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli for the first time early on Saturday, a Lebanese security source said, after more bombardment hit Beirut’s suburbs and Israeli troops sought to make new ground incursions into southern Lebanon.
The source told Reuters a Hamas official, his wife and two children were killed in the strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli. Hamas-affiliated media said the strike killed a leader of the group’s armed wing.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike on Tripoli, a Sunni-majority port city.
Israel has sharply expanded its strikes on Lebanon in recent weeks after nearly a year of exchanging fire with Lebanon’s Iran-backed armed group Hizbullah. Fighting had been mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area, taking place in parallel to Israel’s year-old war in Gaza against Hamas.
Israel has been carrying out nightly bombardment of Beirut’s once densely populated southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hizbullah. Overnight, a military spokesman issued three alerts for residents there to evacuate, and Reuters witnesses then heard at least one blast.
On Friday, Israel said it had targeted Hizbullah’s intelligence headquarters in the southern suburbs and was assessing the damage after a series of strikes on senior figures in the group.
Israel has eliminated much of Hizbullah’s senior military leadership, including secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an air attack on September 27th.
Lebanon’s government says more than 2,000 people have been killed there in the past year, most in the past two weeks. Strikes on medical teams and facilities, including the Lebanese Red Cross, Lebanese public hospitals and rescue workers affiliated to Hizbullah, have also increased.
Lebanon’s government says more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been forced from their homes, and the United Nations (UN) says most displacement shelters in the country are full. Many had gone north to Tripoli or to neighbouring Syria, but an Israeli strike on Friday closed the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the toll on Lebanese civilians “totally unacceptable”.
Israel has been weighing options in its response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Tuesday.
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, also backed by Tehran, in Gaza.
US president Joe Biden on Friday urged Israel to consider alternatives to striking Iranian oilfields, adding that he thinks Israel has not yet concluded how to respond to Iran.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a rare appearance leading Friday prayers, told a huge crowd in Tehran that Iran and its regional allies would not back down.
Iranian minister for foreign affairs Abbas Araqchi landed in Syria on Saturday for talks after a visit to Lebanon, in which he reiterated support for Lebanon and Hizbullah.
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In Hizbullah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs, many buildings have been reduced to rubble. “We’re alive but don’t know for how long,” said Nouhad Chaib, a 40-year-old man displaced from the south.
On Friday, Hizbullah fired more than 200 rockets into Israel, according to the Israeli military, and air raid sirens continued to sound in its north on Saturday.
The latest bloodletting in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered by the Palestinian Hamas group’s attack on October 7th, 2023, that killed 1,200 and in which about 250 were taken as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s ministry for health, and displaced nearly all of Gaza’s population.
The Lebanese government has accused Israel of targeting civilians, pointing to dozens of women and children killed. It has not broken its total death toll down between civilians and Hizbullah fighters.
Israel says it targets military capabilities and takes steps to mitigate the risk of harm to civilians. It accuses Hizbullah and Hamas of hiding among civilians, which they deny.
Israel, which began ground operations targeting southern Lebanon this week, says they are focused on villages near the border and has said Beirut “was not on the table”, but has not specified how long the ground incursion would last.
It says the operations aim to allow tens of thousands of its citizens to return home after Hizbullah bombardments, which began on October 8th, 2023, forced them to evacuate from its north.
Iran’s missile salvo was partly in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, a dominant figure who had turned the group into a powerful armed and political force with reach across the Middle East.
Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying that Hashem Safieddine, rumoured to be Nasrallah’s successor, had been targeted in an underground bunker in Beirut on Thursday night, but his fate was not clear.
Israeli minister for foreign affairs Israel Katz posted a photo of Safieddine and Nasrallah on X on Saturday and urged Khamenei to “take your proxies and leave Lebanon”. – Reuters
