Hezbollah threatens Israel with new attacks, after deadly attack on military base

Lebanese Hezbollah threatened Israel on Monday with new attacks if its offensive continues in Lebanon, the day after a drone strike killed four Israeli soldiers at a military base south of the city of Haifa.

This is the deadliest strike in Israel since the armed Shiite movement and Israel entered into open war on September 23. Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi spoke of a “painful” attack.

Backed by Iran and allied with the Palestinian Hamas, Hezbollah warned that this attack was a “foretaste” of what awaits Israel if it continues its military operations in Lebanon.

The Israeli army reported four soldiers killed and seven wounded at a training camp in Binyamina, south of Haifa, a large city in northern Israel.

A military source told AFP that the strike, carried out by a drone on Sunday evening, hit the dining hall of the military base.

According to United Hatzalah, a volunteer rescue organization, the attack injured more than 60 people.

Hezbollah said its fighters fired “a “explosive drone squadron” on a training camp.

He spoke of a “complex operation”, saying he had launched dozens of missiles simultaneously in the Nahariya and Acre regions in order to “distract Israeli air defense systems”.

– “Shocking violations” –

The drones managed to “bypass” Israeli radars and “reach their target,” according to the movement.

Israel's “Iron Dome” missile defense system intercepts rockets over Haifa, northern Israel, on October 14, 2024 © AFP – Jalaa MAREY

In southern Lebanon, where Israel launched a ground offensive on September 30, Hezbollah said its fighters fired shells early Monday at Israeli troops attempting “infiltration” into the border area.

It said Sunday it was fighting “with automatic weapons” and “rockets” against Israeli soldiers in at least four villages.

The Israeli army reported “face-to-face combat” on Sunday, and said it had captured a Hezbollah fighter in a tunnel in southern Lebanon.

After weakening the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, Israel has shifted the front of the war to Lebanon, saying it wants to allow the return to the north of the country of some 60,000 inhabitants, displaced by the rocket fire carried out for a year by Hezbollah in support of Hamas.

A rescue worker in the rubble of a building destroyed during an Israeli airstrike on the village of Hanouiyeh, in southern Lebanon, on 13 October 2024 © AFP – Bilal KASHMAR

The Lebanese Health Ministry reported Sunday that 51 people were killed the previous day in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, bringing the death toll in the country since September 23 to more than 1,300, according to an AFP tally. The UN has counted nearly 700,000 displaced people since that date.

According to the official Lebanese news agency ANI, the Israeli air force intensified its strikes on villages in southern Lebanon on Sunday.

Israel-Hezbollah fighting in the UN mission's deployment zone © AFP – Nalini LEPETIT-CHELLA, Paz PIZARRO, Jean-Michel CORNU

The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, has denounced “shocking” Israeli violations against its positions in the south of the country, after having castigated “repeated” Israeli fire targeting them on Friday, provoking a diplomatic outcry.

It reported a “forced” entry Sunday morning of two Israeli tanks into one of its positions. The Israeli army indicated that one of its tanks “which was trying to evacuate wounded soldiers” had “rammed a UNIFIL post”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously urged the UN to withdraw UNIFIL from combat zones “immediately.”

UNIFIL vehicles on patrol in Marjeyoun, southern Lebanon, on October 11, 2024 © AFP – –

“Attacks” on peacekeepers may constitute “war crimes”, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Sunday.

The war in Lebanon and Gaza, triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, are coupled with an escalation between Iran and Israel, which threatens to retaliate to an Iranian missile attack on October 1.

The Pentagon announced on Sunday the deployment in Israel of an American high-altitude anti-missile defense system THAAD, in support against Tehran.

– “Fully ready” –

Iran is “fully prepared to face a war situation,” warned its head of diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi.

In the devastated and besieged Gaza Strip, the local Civil Defense reported Sunday evening that an Israeli bombing of a school converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians had killed at least 15 people, “including children” and “entire families” in the Nuseirat camp (center). The attack also left “50 wounded,” according to the organization.

Palestinians look at the destruction amid tents for displaced people at the compound of al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, after an Israeli strike, in the central Gaza Strip, on October 14, 2024 © AFP – Eyad BABA

The Israeli military said it was “examining the information” on the matter.

It regularly accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where thousands of Gazans have sought refuge, a charge denied by the Palestinian Islamist movement.

In addition, the Israeli military announced early Monday that it had carried out a strike targeting a “command and control center, which was located inside a compound that previously served as a hospital The Civil Defense spokesman reported four dead and many wounded, specifying that it was the seventh time that an attack had hit “tents for internally displaced persons” at this hospital.

The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people in Israel, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures and including hostages killed or killed in captivity in Gaza.

At least 42,227 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them civilians, in the Israeli retaliatory offensive in Gaza, according to the data from the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government, deemed reliable by the UN.

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