Lebanon: Hezbollah reports new fighting with Israeli army

The armed movement Hezbollah said early Saturday that it was engaged in clashes with Israeli troops on the Lebanese border, as fresh explosions rang out in Beirut's southern suburbs.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned Friday that his allies, mainly Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, would continue fighting Israel, heightening fears of a flare-up in the Middle East, two days before the first anniversary of Hamas' unprecedented attack on Israeli soil.

“The soldiers of the Israeli enemy have tried again to advance towards the vicinity of the municipality of the village of Adaysseh” and “the clashes are continuing,” Hezbollah said in a statement early Saturday, after previously saying it had forced Israeli soldiers to “retreat” in the area.

The armed Shiite movement also claimed to have targeted troops in the Yarun region in southern Lebanon with a “salvo of rockets”, as well as soldiers in two locations on the Israeli side.

At the same time, a series of explosions were heard in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, according to AFP correspondents. The Israeli army had previously issued evacuation orders for certain areas.

Smoke rises from an area targeted by Israeli fire in the Marjeyoun plain, along Lebanon's southern border, on October 4, 2024 © AFP – –

AFP images show smoke rising from the area near the airport.

On the night of Thursday to Friday, the Israeli army had carried out particularly intense bombardments on the southern suburbs of Beirut, destroying several buildings.

According to the Israeli news site Ynet, these strikes targeted Hashem Safieddine, a potential successor to Hassan Nasrallah, in the Hezbollah intelligence headquarters.

– “Resistance” –

The escalation in Lebanon comes nearly a year after Hezbollah opened a front against Israel at the start of the Gaza war, followed by months of firefights that displaced tens of thousands of residents on both sides of the border.

According to Lebanon's disaster management service, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, including more than a thousand since September 23, when Israeli bombardments intensified. The Lebanese government estimates the number of displaced people at around 1.2 million.

“The resistance in the region will not retreat despite the martyrs,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Friday in a large mosque in Tehran, in a rare speech on the occasion of weekly prayers.

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He considered that the attack by Tehran, which fired some 200 missiles towards Israel on Tuesday, was “the least” of the responses to the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah killed on September 27 in an Israeli raid near Beirut, and to the death on July 31 of Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, in an explosion in Tehran attributed to Israel.

The attack led to cross threats of retaliation between Israel and Iran.

The American president, Joe Biden, considered Friday that Israel must “consider other options” than striking oil sites in Iran, after having raised this possibility the day before. He assured that he was “trying to mobilize the rest of the world” to ease regional tensions.

People fleeing Israeli bombings in Lebanon walk near a crater caused by an Israeli strike, in the Masnaa region, on the Lebanese side of the border crossing with Syria, on October 4, 2024 © AFP – HASSAN JARRAH

The former American head of state and Republican candidate for the November presidential election, Donald Trump, on the contrary judged that Israel should “strike” the nuclear facilities Iranian.

The US military announced Friday that it had targeted 15 Houthi targets in Yemen, from where the Iran-backed rebels have been carrying out attacks on Israel and ships they believe are linked to the country, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom.

– Road cut –

The Israeli army, for its part, has claimed to have killed 250 Hezbollah fighters and struck more than 2,000 sites since it launched a ground offensive against the movement in southern Lebanon on Monday, where nine of its soldiers died in combat.

Two others were killed in a drone attack overnight from Iraq on a military base in the Golan Heights, occupied and annexed by Israel, according to military radio Israeli.

On Friday, the Israeli army carried out a raid in eastern Lebanon, near the Masnaa border crossing, cutting off a vital road axis with neighboring Syria, from where Israel accuses Hezbollah of transporting weapons from Syria. She said she had hit “an underground tunnel” of Hezbollah there.

Syrian children who took refuge in Lebanon return to their country of origin, in Qah, on October 4, 2024 © AFP – AAREF WATAD

Some 374,000 people, mainly Syrians, have fled to Syria in recent days, according to the authorities Lebanese.

A hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut and two in the south have announced that they are suspending their activities due to the Israeli strikes.

The Islamic Health Committee, affiliated with Hezbollah, announced that Israeli bombings had killed 11 of its medics on Friday in southern Lebanon, including seven in front of the Marjayoun hospital.

Hezbollah had previously accused Israel of having struck “civil defense teams” near Beirut, killing one.

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