William Christou, Lorenzo Tondo & Quique Kierszenbaum
The Guardian / September 22, 2024
Israeli military says its jets targeted hundreds of Hezbollah sites, while Hezbollah says it launched dozens of missiles at an airbase in northern Israel.
The Israeli military says it has launched airstrikes on hundreds of targets in southern Lebanon, as Hezbollah launched its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war, prompting a UN official to warn of “imminent catastrophe” in the region.
Fighting reached its most intense yet overnight, with Israel launching a wave of attacks that it said targeted Hezbollah missile launchers across Lebanon’s south. At least one person was killed and another injured in the strikes, the Lebanese ministry of health said.
Hezbollah responded with four rocket barrages early on Sunday morning and more than 140 rockets and drones fired into Israel’s Jezreel Valley.
Fresh clashes erupted early on Sunday, with the IDF saying hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa.
The Israeli military said rockets had been fired “toward civilian areas”, pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said it had treated four people for shrapnel wounds, including a 76-year-old man who was slightly wounded near Haifa.
In a statement, the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon warned the region risked disaster.
“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,” special coordinator Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said on X.
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 underground, secure facility, the ministry said.
Israel’s civil defence agency ordered all schools in the north of the country to close.
The successive barrages of rocket attacks launched by Hezbollah at the Israeli air force’s Ramat David airbase, located 31 miles (50km) from the Lebanon border, were the deepest strikes it has claimed since hostilities began.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, delivered a speech at the airbase on Wednesday, telling air force personnel that Israel’s war with Hezbollah had reached a “new phase”.
In July, Hezbollah released footage filmed by a drone over Haifa that highlighted Ramat David as part of an almost 10-minute long video marking military infrastructure in the densely populated city in northern Israel.
On Saturday, Israel closed its northern airspace as it awaited Hezbollah retaliation for the assassination of Ibrahim Aqil, a veteran commander of the elite Radwan unit, along with more than a dozen other militants.
Three children and seven women were among 37 people killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader, Lebanese authorities have said.
The 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 be behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.
On Sunday the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “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 added: “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.”
Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday, its forces bombed a school-turned-shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.
However, the most recent attacks suggest a potential strategic pivot by the Israeli military away from its focus on Hamas in Gaza and towards targeting Hezbollah.
On 8 October, following the Hamas attacks on Israel, Hezbollah entered the conflict in support of the Palestinian militants, with an attack on northern Israel.
Since then, Israel and Hezbollah have managed to avoid an all-out war, engaging instead in a limited conflict of attrition. Nevertheless, political and military experts argue that the recent escalation triggered by the pager attacks has transformed the conflict, potentially setting the stage for a full-scale war.
“There’s no such thing as a ‘limited war’ in Lebanon,” said Alon Pinkas, who served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004 and is now a political analyst for Haaretz. “Anyone who uses that term either conveniently forgot history or doesn’t understand the current environment, and anyone who thinks ‘escalation’ and ‘limited’ are controllable constructs is delusional.”
On Sunday an Iraqi coalition of pro-Iran armed groups also claimed a drone attack on Israel.
“The fighters of the Islamic Resistance of Iraq targeted on Sunday morning a strategic location in the occupied territories using drones,” said the Iraqi coalition in a statement on Telegram, referring to Israel, adding it was carried out “in support of our people in Gaza”.
The IDF confirmed the attack and said it had intercepted “multiple suspicious aerial targets” coming from Iraq overnight.
William Christou is a Beirut-based journalist
Lorenzo Tondo is a Guardian correspondent
Quique Kierszenbaum is a Jerusalem based reporter and photographer
With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
