Lorenzo Tondo & William Christou
The Guardian / September 22, 2024
Both sides engage in significant escalation in conflict, prompting UN to say region is on ‘brink of imminent catastrophe’.
Hezbollah has said it has entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel after launching a series of rocket attacks on the north of the country as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.
In a significant escalation of the conflict, Israeli warplanes carried out their most intense bombardment in almost a year across southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah responded with its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The events prompted the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to warn of the risk “of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza”.
During a funeral for a top commander killed along with 44 other people in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Naim Qassem, said on Sunday that an “open-ended battle of reckoning has started”. “Threats will not stop us,” he said. “We are ready to face all military possibilities.”
As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war as authorities said four people had been killed and nine injured over the weekend. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was also trenchant in his rhetoric.
“In the last few days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it did not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you it will understand the message,” he said.
“No country can tolerate shooting at its residents, shooting at its cities, and we, the state of Israel, will not tolerate it either … We will do everything necessary to restore security.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said early on Sunday that hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa. They said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas”, pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.
Six people were reported to have been injured.
The UN’s special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a statement on X: “With the region on the brink of an imminent catastrophe, it cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer.”
As she wrote, the Israeli health ministry urged hospitals in northern Israel to transfer their operations to facilities with extra protection from rocket and missile fire. Rambam hospital in Haifa would transfer patients to its secure underground facility, the ministry said.
Dr Noam Yehudai of the Tzafon Medical Center, said staff were preparing the sheltered areas to receive patients. “We are discharging patients whose medical condition allows for safe discharge to their homes, cancelling all elective surgeries until further notice, while urgent and oncological surgeries continue as scheduled,” he said.
Sarah Kiperwas from Krayot said: “I heard a big blast around 6.30am. From our balcony, I could see flames and then they told us that someone got hurt. I am 68 years old and I have lived in this neighbourhood all my life. This is the fourth time in my life that my city has been hit. This time I believe it will be harder than the others. Hezbollah had been there for almost a year waiting to make our lives impossible. But we are ready to fight and finish it.
“No one in the world would stand by if the enemy continues to bomb us.”
In Lebanon, a relentless week of attacks has made the conflict impossible to ignore. Three children and seven women were among those killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil, Lebanese authorities have said.
His assassination followed a wave of attacks earlier in the week in which walkie-talkies and pagers commonly used by Hezbollah members exploded, killing 42 people and wounding more than 3,000. Israel is presumed to have been behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.
The sudden, brutal nature of the attacks shattered whatever sense of safety Lebanese people had felt. “It was the first time that I felt that the war is around us, that we’re not safe anymore. We don’t know where the next Israeli attack will be. I’m avoiding gatherings or unknown areas,” said Amal Cherif, a 52-year-old activist and resident of central Beirut.
The fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah militants is taking place in parallel to the unrelenting conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Seven people were killed on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike hit a school in western Gaza City that had been housing hundreds of displaced people, Palestinian health officials said.
Eleven months into the war, the death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians and the figure amounts to nearly 2% of Gaza’s pre-war population, or one in 50 people. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage.
World powers moved at the weekend to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said escalating the conflict was not in Israel’s best interest.
Washington was saying this “directly to our Israeli counterparts” and believed “there can be time and space for a diplomatic solution here and that’s what we’re working on”, he told ABC.
The EU called for an “urgent ceasefire” and “renewed intense diplomatic mediation efforts”, a message echoed by the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, who noted the “worrying escalation”.
Addressing the Labour party’s annual conference, Lammy said a ceasefire would facilitate “a political settlement, so that Israelis and Lebanese civilians can return to their homes and live in peace and security”.
Guterres, however, said the language used by both sides indicated a lack of desire to explore peace. “It is for me clear that both sides are not interested in a ceasefire. And that is a tragedy, because this is a war that must stop,” he told CNN.
Lorenzo Tondo is a Guardian correspondent
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
