Israel has escalated its military operations on two fronts with heavy bombing raids and mass evacuation orders in southern Lebanon and Gaza, as officials issued new threats of a retaliatory strike against Iran before the one-year anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attacks.
Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited troops near the Lebanese border on Sunday for the first time and declared that Israel would “emerge victorious” in the conflict, as European leaders issued renewed calls for a ceasefire to halt the simultaneous wars in Lebanon and Gaza that have killed more than 42,000 people in the last year.
But Israeli forces were poised to escalate their attacks, issuing a new blanket evacuation order for all of the northern Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of civilians remain, as a military spokesperson declared a “new phase of the war” against Hamas.
Health workers in Gaza said 24 people had been killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli air strike on a mosque in central Gaza early on Sunday. Local aid workers said the mosque, which was near al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, had housed people who had been displaced in earlier bombing raids. The Israeli military claimed that the mosque had been a “Hamas command post”.
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Meanwhile, Israeli jets launched air strikes on the Dahiyeh neighbourhood of southern Beirut in what Lebanon’s National News Agency called the “most severe” bombing of the war. Israeli attacks in the area, which is a stronghold for the militant group Hizbullah, have continued at such a high pace that rescue workers have been unable to access the area for days.
In Israel, one woman was killed and 10 people were wounded in a suspected terror attack at the central bus station in Be’er Sheva, a city in the Negev desert in southern Israel. The assailant was killed by police.
Israel is on high alert while preparing October 7th commemorations, with the president, Yitzhak Herzog, planning to conduct a three-day tour of the border communities along Gaza, beginning at the site of the Nova music festival near the Re’im kibbutz, where 364 people were killed during the Hamas attack.
Israel remains poised to launch fresh strikes against Iran after officials vowed to retaliate against a strike by Iran that included more than 180 missiles, according to Israel, and managed to hit a crucial airbase more than 30 times.
Speaking on Sunday, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli minister of defence, said the bombing had not affected the air force’s ability to operate, and vowed that Israel would strike back against Iran at a time of its choosing.
Israel has said dozens of its soldiers have been injured in Lebanon in the last week of combat, while Hizbullah claimed to have killed 20 soldiers over this weekend. The number of dead has not been confirmed by Israel.
Iran’s foreign minister on Saturday warned that Tehran would retaliate if attacked by Israel. “Our reaction to any attack by the Zionist regime is completely clear,” Abbas Araghchi told reporters during a trip to Syria. “For every action, there will be a proportional and similar reaction from Iran, and even stronger.”
Elsewhere on Sunday, the United Nations’ refugee chief Filippo Grandi said on Sunday that air strikes in Lebanon had violated international humanitarian law by hitting civilian infrastructure and killing civilians, in reference to Israel’s bombardment of the country.
“Unfortunately, many instances of violations of international humanitarian law in the way the air strikes are conducted that have destroyed or damaged civilian infrastructure, have killed civilians, have impacted humanitarian operations,” he told media in Beirut.
Mr Grandi was in Lebanon as it struggles to cope with the displacement of more than 1.2 million people as a result of the expanded Israeli air and ground operation.
Mr Grandi said all parties to the conflict and those with influence on them should “stop this carnage that is happening both in Gaza and in Lebanon today”.
More than 2,000 people have been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded in Lebanon in nearly a year of fighting, most in the past two weeks, the Lebanese health ministry says. Israel says around 50 civilians and soldiers have been killed. – Guardian/Reuters