Israel’s military stated that a Hezbollah drone killed four soldiers at one of its northern bases on Sunday, as it expanded its bombardments of Lebanon and troops battled militants across the border.
The attack on a military training camp in Binyamina, near Haifa, was the deadliest such assault on an Israeli base since 23 September, when Israel intensified its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Emergency services reported more than 60 wounded.
Authorities in Gaza, meanwhile, said the death toll from an Israeli strike on Sunday on a school being used as a shelter for displaced people had risen to 15, including entire families, while a separate overnight strike on a hospital killed four.
As fighting raged between Israeli and Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, United Nations peacekeepers said they had once again been caught in the crossfire.
They reported that Israeli troops “forcibly” entered a UN position with two tanks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the force to withdraw from the area.
Israel’s military stated that a tank had reversed into the UN post while under fire.
Hezbollah promises worse –
Iran-backed Hezbollah announced late on Sunday that it had launched “a squadron of attack drones” at the Binyamina camp, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of the major city of Haifa.
The strike was in retaliation for Israeli attacks, including airstrikes on Thursday that Lebanon’s health ministry said had killed at least 22 people in central Beirut.
In a later statement, Hezbollah warned Israel that “what it witnessed today in southern Haifa is nothing compared to what awaits it if it continues its aggression against our noble and dear people”.
An Israeli volunteer rescue service, United Hatzalah, said its teams in Binyamina assisted “over 60 wounded people” with injuries ranging from mild to critical.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets and drones into Israel for more than a year in support of Hamas militants in Gaza.
Since late September, however, its strikes have reached further into the country.
Israel’s sophisticated air defences have intercepted most of the
projectiles, with few casualties caused by strikes or falling debris.
Defend this ‘blessed land’ –
Israel’s recent strikes have increasingly targeted areas beyond Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in southern Beirut, and Lebanon’s south and east.
Israel stated that its air force had hit “Hezbollah launchers, anti-tank missile posts, weapons storage facilities” and other targets, while on the ground, its soldiers “eliminated dozens” of fighters.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported that Israeli forces had “escalated their attacks” on southern Lebanon with “successive airstrikes” pounding several border villages.
It later reported that an Israeli strike on Mayfadoun, near Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, had killed five people and wounded another.
Hezbollah reported that its forces had clashed several times with Israeli troops who attempted to “infiltrate” villages along the border.
Before the drone strike, it had reported launching a salvo of rockets at a “base in southern Haifa”.
The group later broadcast an audio recording of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, calling on fighters to “defend this holy and blessed land and this honourable people”.
Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Beirut on 27 September, and several other senior commanders of the movement have also been killed.
Israel’s military stated that about 115 projectiles fired by Hezbollah had crossed into Israeli territory by Sunday afternoon.
A Hezbollah fighter was captured emerging from a tunnel in southern Lebanon on Sunday, Israel’s military said, marking the first such announcement since the start of the ground offensive.
‘Shocking violations’ –
UN peacekeepers accused Israeli troops of breaking through a gate and entering one of their positions before dawn on Sunday in southern Lebanon, the latest in a series of incidents the UNIFIL mission has reported since Thursday.
Five Blue Helmets have so far been injured, prompting international condemnation.
“Two IDF (Israeli military) Merkava tanks destroyed the position’s main gate and forcibly entered the position” in the Ramia area, before leaving 45 minutes later, UNIFIL said.
The Israeli military later said a tank had “reversed several metres into a UNIFIL post” while “under fire” and attempting to evacuate injured soldiers.
Earlier on Sunday, Netanyahu had called on the UN to move peacekeepers in southern Lebanon out of harm’s way, after the mission rejected requests to abandon its positions.
The peacekeepers’ presence had “the effect of providing Hezbollah terrorists with human shields”, Netanyahu claimed.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated on Sunday that “attacks” against peacekeepers “may constitute a war crime”.
UNIFIL, with about 9,500 troops, operates in southern Lebanon under the longstanding UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which stipulated that only the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers should be deployed in southern Lebanon.
Three Lebanese soldiers were wounded on Sunday, the country’s army reported, when Israeli forces fired on military vehicles in the Marjayoun area.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a phone call with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, urged Tehran to support “a general de-escalation” in Lebanon and Gaza, his office stated.
US sending more air defences –
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli shelling had killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens more on Sunday at a school turned shelter for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp.
“The school was bombarded with a large volley of Israeli artillery, resulting in an initial death toll of 15 martyrs, including children, women and entire families, and 50 wounded,” said Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the agency.
Israel’s military stated it was “looking into the reports”.
Separately, the military said early on Monday that it had carried out a strike targeting a “command and control centre, which was embedded inside a compound that previously served as the ‘Shuhadah Al-Aqsa’ hospital”.
Civil defence spokesman Bassal said the strike had killed four people and wounded many more, noting that it was the seventh time an attack had hit the “tents for displaced people inside the walls of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital”.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated late on Sunday that a WHO-Palestine Red Crescent operation had managed to resupply two hospitals in northern Gaza.
“WHO and partners finally managed to reach Kamal Adwan and Al-Sahaba hospitals yesterday after nine attempts this past week,” he posted on X.
Hamas sparked the war in Gaza with the deadliest-ever attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
This number includes hostages killed in captivity.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza reports that more than 42,000 people, the majority civilians, have been killed since Israel’s military campaign began there. The UN considers these figures reliable.
Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed more than 1,300 people since 23 September, according to an AFP tally of official figures, including Saturday’s figures.
That toll exceeds the entire Lebanese death toll of 1,200 — mostly civilians — in the last Hezbollah-Israel war in 2006, during which 160 people, mostly soldiers, died in Israel.
The Pentagon announced it would deploy a high-altitude anti-missile system and its US military crew to Israel to help the ally protect itself from potential Iranian attack.
AFP
