Israel-Lebanon latest: Israel strikes central Beirut as Biden fears Iran attack over Hezbollah chief’s death
The number of displaced people in Lebanon has surged from 300,000 to nearly one million
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Israel intensified its military campaign across the Middle East on Monday, striking central Beirut for the first time since 2006.
The attack brings the death toll from Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon to over 1,000 people in the last two weeks, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
In just a few hours this weekend, the number of displaced people in Lebanon surged from 300,000 to nearly one million, said Nasser Yassin, Lebanon’s head of emergency disaster management.
A drone attack also reportedly killed three senior leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a militant group involved in the ongoing conflict with Israel.
It comes as the US administration warned they were concerned Iran, which backs Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, was planning on conducting retaliatory strikes against Israel.
The Pentagon said in a statement Sunday night that “should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every necessary measure to defend our people.”
Israel kills Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in strike marking major escalation in conflict
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The killing of Hezbollah’s leader will make Israel no safer
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Who was Hassan Nasrallah? Hezbollah leader of Lebanese militant group killed in Israeli strike
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Israeli airstrike on northeast Lebanon kills 11
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Seventh Hezbollah chief killed
The militant group Hezbollah has confirmed another of its senior leaders has been killed in an Israeli airstrike - the seventh senior leader of the Lebanese militant group to be killed in eight days, including Hassan Nasrallah.
Nabil Kaouk was killed on Saturday, the Israeli military said.
Hezbollah also confirmed on Sunday that Ali Karaki died in the same attack as Nasrallah in Beirut on Friday.
Top Islamist group member ‘killed in Israeli strike'
An Israeli strike on Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has killed a senior figure in the Sunni Jama’a Islamiya group, Mohammad Dahrouj, two security sources claim.
The Sunni Islamist political group has fired rockets on Israel over the past year and Israel has previously conducted strikes targeting other leading figures from the group.
Residents flock to site of destruction
More than two days after a massive Israeli airstrike that killed the leader of the Hezbollah militant group, smoke is still rising from the smoldering wreckage.
People flocked to the site, some to check on what was left of their homes, others to pay respects and pray, and others simply to see the destruction.
Residents of Beirut heard up to 10 explosions following the Friday strike that targeted an area greater than a city block, reducing several residential buildings to a jumble of pancaked concrete and twisted steel. The buildings sank into the ground, leaving a cleared-out area nearly the size of a football field.
Weapons experts said the blasts and destruction left behind were consistent with the 2,000lb-class bombs (900kg).
Onlookers at the site today clambered over slabs of concrete, surrounded by piles of twisted metal and wreckage. Several craters, likely to be used by rescuers to penetrate under the site of the explosion were visible, some of them apparently up to 30m (100ft) deep.
A few Hezbollah workers were using a bulldozer to excavate around one of the craters. State security and investigators were nowhere to be seen.
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Supporters of Nasrallah mourn loss of slain leader
Supporters of Hezbollah and other Lebanese people who hailed the group’s role fighting Israel mourned the death of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“We lost the leader who gave us all the strength and faith that we, this small country that we love, could turn it into a paradise,” Sophia Blanche Rouillard, a Lebanese Christian who carried a black flag to work in Beirut on Sunday, told Reuters.
An Arab Barometer poll in Lebanon earlier this year found that just 30 per cent trusted Hezbollah, whereas 55 per cent said they did not trust the group at all.
Those who said they trust the group rose to 85 per cent among Shia Muslims, but was just 9 per cent of Sunnis and Druze, and 6 per cent of Christians.
Editorial | The killing of Hezbollah’s leader will make Israel no safer
Here is a snippet from The Independent’s editorial on the killing of Hassan Nasrallah:
In the short term, of course, it will demoralise Hezbollah and its allies in Hamas and Iran. If the assassination is a substitute for the “all-out war” that was feared in southern Lebanon, that may be no bad thing. But it will not defeat Hezbollah, nor will it kill the aim that it espouses of wiping Israel off the map.
It has to be remembered that Hezbollah was formed in the first place to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel invaded to try to stop the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), originally a secular nationalist movement, from launching attacks from there. The PLO was thus supplanted by an Islamist state within a state in Lebanon.
A decade later, Israel assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s leader, only for him to be replaced by Nasrallah who was, if anything, more extreme and more dangerous. This is the hydra principle in action: assassinating the leaders of militant organisations tends to lead to their replacement by harder-line commanders.
As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff who played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace talks, has said: “Unintended consequences tend to prevail.” Mr Powell has argued that “terrorists” almost always have to be negotiated with in the end. A policy of decapitation makes that harder because the new leaders will be more extreme and less likely to be worn down by years of fighting.
The killing of Hezbollah’s leader will make Israel no safer
Editorial: The use of assassination as an instrument of war is doomed only to escalate the cycle of violence
Hezbollah confirms Karaki killed in strike alongside Nasrallah
Hezbollah has now confirmed that its senior leader Ali Karaki was killed in the Israeli strike that killed the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
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