The exodus from southern Lebanon, where Israel has been carrying out intensive air strikes, has begun northwards. In the most violent attack since the 2006 war, the Israeli army said it had hit 1600 targets, while Hezbollah fired 200 rockets into Israel.
The Israeli army has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Lebanon since yesterday morning, targeting southern cities as well as the Bekaa and Baalbek regions. The Lebanese Health Ministry announced that 492 people, including 35 children and 58 women, were killed and 1645 wounded in the attacks.
The wave of migration from the southern regions of the country to the capital Beirut and the north continues.
While the Lebanese Ministry of Education announced that education had been suspended throughout the country, the Ministry of Interior announced that schools in the south of the country had been opened to accommodate citizens displaced by Israeli attacks.
Hezbollah also fired more than 200 rockets into Israel in retaliation. Sirens sounded in northern Israel, near Haifa and in some settlements near Tel Aviv, as Israelis took cover in bomb shelters. The Hezbollah attack was recorded as one of the heaviest since the conflict began on 8 October.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that the Israeli army’s air strikes had ‘destroyed’ the infrastructure that Hezbollah had built up in Lebanon over 20 years. Gallant claimed that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah had been ‘left alone at the top’ and that ‘all units of the Ridwan Force have been decommissioned’.
Yesterday’s Israeli attack on Beirut killed 15 Hezbollah members, including Ibrahim Aqil, one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders, and Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi, one of the former commanders of the ‘Ridwan Force’.
On the other hand, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking from a bunker at the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, claimed that Israel had changed the balance of power with Hezbollah and signalled that Israel would no longer be on the defensive after months of clashes. Since last October, tens of thousands of Israelis have been forced to flee their homes in northern Israel because of Hezbollah’s relentless rocket fire. Last week, the Israeli cabinet set the safe return of its citizens to their homes as the goal of the current conflict.
Meeting with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Air Force Commander Tomer Bar, Netanyahu claimed that Israel’s strikes were aimed only at eliminating senior Hezbollah officials, terrorists and missile depots. Netanyahu said: “Whoever tries to harm us, we will harm them even more. I promised that we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north, and that is what we are doing. We are destroying thousands of rockets and missiles aimed at Israeli cities and Israeli citizens”.
The United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, responded to Netanyahu’s claim that ‘Israel is only targeting Hezbollah’ by saying: “Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese know you are lying”.
“Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese know that the Israeli leadership is as ruthless as it is willing to spread genocidal violence across the region to maintain its power and advance its settler-colonial agenda,’ Albanese said. Like the Palestinians, the Lebanese may wonder why you are not yet in The Hague (to stand trial),” Albanese said, adding that the Lebanese, like the Palestinians, may be too wounded, traumatised or brainwashed to see any alternative to living in a state of perpetual war with most of Israeli society.
