Israel carried out another series of punitive air strikes on Friday, hitting the suburbs of Beirut and cutting off the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria for tens of thousands of people fleeing Israeli bombing of the Hezbollah militant group.
The explosions that occurred during the night in the southern suburb of Beirut sent huge columns of smoke and flames into the night sky and shook buildings kilometers away in the Lebanese capital. Additional raids sent people running for cover in the rubble-strewn streets of the Dahiya neighbourhood, where at least one building was flattened and cars burned.
The Israeli army said it targeted Hezbollah’s Central Intelligence headquarters around midnight. It did not say who it was targeting or whether any militants were killed in that strike, but it claimed to have killed 100 Hezbollah fighters in the past 24 hours.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported more than 10 successive airstrikes in the area. About 1,400 Lebanese have been killed, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, and about 1.2 million have been displaced from their homes since Israel escalated its strikes in late September with the aim of paralyzing Hezbollah and removing it from the common border between the two countries.
On the other hand, the Israeli army said that Hezbollah fired about 100 missiles at Israel on Friday.
The Israeli military also said that a strike in Beirut the day before killed Mohammed Rashid Skafi, head of Hezbollah’s communications department. The army said in a statement that Al-Skafi was “a senior Hezbollah terrorist and had been in charge of the communications unit since 2000” and was “closely linked” to senior Hezbollah officials.
Thursday’s strike along the Lebanese-Syrian border, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Beirut, closed the road near the busy Masnaa border crossing — the first time the road has been blocked since Hezbollah and Israel nearly began exchanging fire. A year ago.
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Israel said it targeted the crossing because it was being used by Hezbollah to transport military equipment across the border. It said that fighter jets struck a tunnel used to smuggle weapons from Iran and other agents into Lebanon.
Hezbollah is believed to have obtained much of its weapons through Syria from Iran, its main backer.
Associated Press video footage showed two huge holes on both sides of the road. People got out of cars, unable to pass, carrying bags of their belongings as they crossed on foot. More than 250,000 Syrians and 82,000 Lebanese fled across the border into Syria during the escalation that occurred over the past two weeks. There are six crossings between the two countries, most of which are still open.
Israel began its ground escalation in Lebanon on Tuesday, and its forces clashed with Hezbollah fighters in a narrow strip along the border. Israel pledged to put an end to Hezbollah’s fire on northern Israel, after nearly a year of exchanges between the two sides that led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people from their homes on both sides of the border. Israeli raids over the past two weeks have killed some key Hezbollah members, including leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel on Thursday warned residents to evacuate communities in southern Lebanon, including areas outside the buffer zone declared by the United Nations after a month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told reporters on Friday that the ground operations were limited and aimed to eliminate Hezbollah fighters and make the border safe for residents of northern Israel to return to their homes.
“First and foremost, our mission is to make sure they (Hezbollah) are not there,” Shoshani said. “Then we’ll talk about how to make sure they don’t come back.”
The army said that nine Israeli soldiers were killed in close combat in the area filled with weapons and explosives.
Two more soldiers were killed and two others were seriously injured in a drone attack in northern Israel, military officials said.
An umbrella group of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq calling themselves the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it carried out three drone strikes on Friday in northern Israel. In recent months, the movement has regularly announced drone attacks on Israel, but the attacks rarely occurred.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who was in Beirut on Friday to meet with Lebanese officials, warned that if Israel carried out an attack on Iran, Tehran would respond more forcefully than it did this week when it fired at least 180 missiles at Israel in response. Israeli strikes on Hezbollah.
The missile barrage amid a series of rapidly escalating attacks threatened to push the Middle East closer to a region-wide war.
Araqchi said after his meeting with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri: “If the Israeli entity takes any step or action against us, our response will be stronger than before.”
In the Iranian capital, Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led Friday prayers and delivered a speech in which he praised the missile strikes launched by the country on Israel and said that Iran was ready to launch more strikes if necessary.
He spoke to thousands of people at Tehran’s main prayer site, the Al-Musalla Mosque, which was decorated with a huge Palestinian flag.
Hezbollah began firing on Israel the day after a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which the militants killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage. Since then, Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, just over half of them women and children, according to local health officials.
Meanwhile, Israel carried out its deadliest raids in the occupied West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, hitting a café in the Tulkarm refugee camp. The Palestinian Ministry of Health said that at least 18 Palestinians were killed. Relatives said that among the dead was a family of four, including two children. The Israeli army said a number of Hamas activists were killed, including the group’s leader in the camp.
The Israeli army announced on Friday that activists in Gaza fired two rockets into Israeli territory, which is the first time that Israel has witnessed the launch of rockets from the Strip in a month.
The military said Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted one of the missiles while the other fell in an open area near a kibbutz across the border from Gaza.
