Photo: Etienne Torbey Agence France-Presse Smoke rises from the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the southern suburbs of Beirut, October 5, 2024.
Benoit Finck – Agence France-Presse and Layal Abou Rahal – Agence France-Presse In Beirut
Published at 9:16 a.m. Updated at 12:13 p.m.
- Middle East
Israel is preparing a response to the missile attack launched on its territory by Iran, a military official announced Saturday, at a time when the Israeli army is carrying out new strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, allies of Tehran.
The Iranian attack on Tuesday, the second since April, and the threat of an Israeli response, have stoked fears of a conflagration in the Middle East.
Israel is “preparing a response,” an Israeli military official told AFP on condition of anonymity, two days before the first anniversary of the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in the Gaza Strip. Gaza.
After weakening Hamas in a devastating retaliatory offensive that is still ongoing in the besieged Palestinian territory, Israel shifted the bulk of its operations in mid-September to the Lebanese front, opened by Hezbollah in support of Hamas at the start of the war in Gaza.
Its army launched a campaign of violent and deadly aerial bombardments on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, killing on September 27 its leader Hassan Nasrallah, considered the most powerful man in the country, in a devastating raid on the movement's central headquarters located, according to Israel, under buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
On Friday before dawn, it again violently pounded the southern suburbs, targeting, according to the Israeli news site Ynet, Hashem Safieddine, a potential successor to Nasrallah. The army has not confirmed this information.
But on Saturday, a Hezbollah official told AFP that contact with Hashem Safieddine had been “lost” since Friday's strikes. A second source close to the movement said that the latter is “trying to reach the headquarters that was targeted underground.”
The Israeli army claimed to have killed “most” of Hezbollah’s leaders in operations in recent months against the movement, which has been “infiltrated” by Israel according to experts.
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In mid-September, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government included the return home of tens of thousands of displaced people from northern Israel, which borders southern Lebanon, among its war objectives.
Israel wants to end the threat that Hezbollah poses to its northern border with its rocket fire and to move its fighters away from the border regions of southern Lebanon.
In addition to the aerial bombardments, its forces launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon on Monday. Nine soldiers have died there since then.
The army, which claims to be carrying out “limited, localized and targeted” raids there, said it had killed Hezbollah fighters and located weapons depots and tunnels.
The Lebanese movement reported clashes with soldiers in the region on Saturday. He also announced the firing of new rockets at an air base near Haifa and a military industrial plant in northern Israel.
“Increasingly stronger”
New Israeli strikes also rocked Beirut’s southern suburbs.
The Israeli army launched massive bombings on September 23, mainly against Hezbollah strongholds in eastern and southern Lebanon as well as the southern suburbs.
Pillars of smoke continue to rise from targeted sites in the southern suburbs, where residents are hastily gathering their belongings.
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In a nearby neighborhood, Abu Abbas, a 62-year-old restaurant owner told AFP he wanted to stay home despite the strikes “getting harder every night.”
According to Hamas, two of its leaders were killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, one in the north and the other in the east. The army confirmed killing them.
Oil, nuclear ?
According to the authorities, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, including more than a thousand since September 23. Some 1.2 million people have been displaced.
Tehran says the 200 or so missiles fired at Israel on Tuesday were a “legitimate” response to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah and the July 31 killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Tehran blamed on Israel.
On Friday, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned that his allies would continue the fight against Israel.
US President Joe Biden advised Israel against attacking Iranian oil sites. His predecessor and Republican candidate for his succession, Donald Trump, suggested strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Deadly strikes in Gaza
In the Gaza Strip, starved and ravaged by 12 months of war and where the vast majority of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced, 12 people, including children, have been killed by Israeli strikes, according to medical sources and the Civil Defense.
Since the start of the war, 41,825 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the latest toll from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry.
On both fronts, “we are winning,” Benjamin Netanyahu recently boasted.
He is due to deliver a speech to the nation on Monday to commemorate the Hamas attack, which left 1,205 dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people kidnapped during the attack, 97 are still being held hostage in Gaza, including 33 declared dead by the army.