Israeli strike hits north Lebanon as raids pound Beirut
Maya Gebeily, Timour Azhari and Maayan Lubell |
An Israeli strike has hit Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli for the first time, a Lebanese security source says, 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 early on Saturday 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 Hezbollah.
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 Hezbollah, and the military overnight issued three alerts for residents there to evacuate.
On Friday, Israel said it had targeted Hezbollah’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 Hezbollah’s senior military leadership, including Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an air attack on September 27.
Lebanon’s government says more than 2000 people have been killed there in the past year, most in the past two weeks.
Lebanon’s government says more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been forced from their homes, and the United Nations 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 spokesperson 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 Hezbollah 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 oil fields, adding he thought Israel had 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 Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi landed in Syria on Saturday for talks after a visit to Lebanon, in which he reiterated support for Lebanon and Hezbollah.
On Friday, Hezbollah 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 7, 2023, that killed 1200 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 health ministry, and displaced nearly all Gaza’s population.
Israel, which began ground operations targeting southern Lebanon this week, says it is focused on villages near the border and has said Beirut is “not on the table”, but has not specified how long the ground incursion will last.
It says the operations aim to allow tens of thousands of its citizens to return home after Hezbollah bombardments, which began on October 8, 2023, forced them to leave northern Israel.
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 force in the Middle East.
Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying 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 Foreign Minister Israel Katz posted a photo of Safieddine and Nasrallah on X on Saturday and urged Khamenei to “take your proxies and leave Lebanon”.
Reuters