Hezbollah declares ‘open-ended’ battle with Israel
Hezbollah has fired more than 100 rockets into Israel while airstrikes hit Lebanon as both sides appear to be spiralling closer toward all-out war.
Hezbollah fired more than 100 rockets across northern Israel on Sunday, with some landing near the city of Haifa, as Israel launched hundreds of strikes on Lebanon.
The overnight rocket barrage was in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon that have killed dozens, including a veteran Hezbollah commander, and an unprecedented attack last week targeting the military group’s communications devices.
Air raid sirens across northern Israel sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling into shelters on Sunday.
One struck near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a city near Haifa, wounding at least three people and setting buildings and cars ablaze. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said four people were wounded.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said three people were killed and four wounded in Israeli strikes near the border, without saying whether they were civilians or combatants.
The rocket attacks followed an Israeli airstrike Friday in Beirut that killed at least 45 people, including Ibrahim Akil, one of Hezbollah’s top leaders, several other fighters and women and children.
Hezbollah was already reeling from a sophisticated attack that caused thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies to explode just days earlier.
But it faces a difficult balance of stretching the rules of engagement by hitting deeper into Israel, while at the same time trying to avoid large-scale attacks on civilian areas and infrastructure that could trigger a full-scale war that it would rather not start and take the blame for.
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Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Kassem said Sunday’s rocket attack was just the beginning of what’s now an “open-ended battle” with Israel.
“We admit that we are pained. We are humans. But as we are pained — you will also be pained,” Kassem said at Akil’s funeral.
He vowed Hezbollah would continue military operations against Israel but also warned of unexpected attacks “from outside the box,” pointing to rockets fired deeper into Israel.
Late on Sunday night, Hezbollah announced a series of strikes on military sites in northern Israel with missiles and artillery shelling. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties or damages.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would take whatever action was necessary to restore security in the north and allow people to return to their homes.
“No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can’t accept it either,” he said.
Seven people, including three women and two children, were buried in the southern Lebanese town of Mays al-Jabal, where Christian Lebanese lawmaker Melhem Khalaf said Israel “relies on the laws of the jungle instead international conventions, especially with protecting civilians”.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the US has been “involved in extensive and quite assertive diplomacy”.
“We want to make sure that we can continue to do everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border,”he said.
The Israeli military said it had struck about 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers, across southern Lebanon in the past 24 hours, thwarting an even larger attack.
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“Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel,” Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said.
“Today we saw fire that was deeper into Israel than before.”
The military also said it intercepted multiple aerial devices fired from the direction of Iraq, after Iran-backed militant groups there claimed to have launched a drone attack on Israel.
School was cancelled across northern Israel, and the health ministry said all hospitals in the north would move operations to protected areas in the medical centres.
Israel considers Gaza siege plan for Hamas
Meanwhile, Israel is examining a plan to use siege tactics against Hamas in northern Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been quoted by several Israeli media outlets as saying.
The reports cited unnamed sources at a closed parliament committee meeting.
The plan, published by retired military commanders and floated by some parliament members this month, suggests Palestinian civilians would be instructed to evacuate northern Gaza, which would then be declared a closed military zone.
An estimated 5000 Hamas militants remaining there would then be put under siege until they surrender. Army Radio reported that Netanyahu told MPs at parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee that it was being examined.
Public broadcaster Kan quoted Netanyahu as saying that the blueprint “makes sense” and that “it is one of the plans being considered but there are others as well.”
Israel has faced fierce international criticism for the humanitarian crisis brought on by its nearly one-year offensive against the Hamas militant group in Gaza.
Palestinians at Jabila camp in northern Gaza after Israeli aistrikes. Photo: SOPA Images
Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced. An estimated one million people – half the population – are currently crammed into a designated humanitarian zone that makes up less than 15 per cent of the territory and is lacking essential infrastructure and services, according to the United Nations.
Humanitarian access to northern Gaza, where estimates of the population run between 300,000 and 500,000 people – is especially difficult, according to the United Nations.
The war was sparked when Hamas-led militants burst into Israel on October 7, killing 1200 people, most of them civilians, and taking another 250 hostage into Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive since, according to the Gaza health ministry. Gaza health officials say most are civilians.
– with AAP
