The Israeli military says it attacked dozens of targets of Hezbollah as fears grow of an all-out war.
Israel’s military says it carried out dozens of air raids across Lebanon targeting Hezbollah after the assassination of the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in a southern Beirut suburb.
At least 11 people were killed in an air raid on a house in the town of Ain in the Bekaa Valley in the northeast, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency.
Hezbollah confirmed on Saturday that Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli strike a day earlier in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya, dealing a massive blow to the group engaged in fighting with Israel since last October. Hezbollah started firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The group has set a ceasefire in Gaza as a condition to stop its cross-border attacks.
The Israeli military said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday that its air forces attacked “dozens of terrorist targets” in Lebanon in the past few hours, hitting “buildings where weapons and military structures of the organisation were stored”.
Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Marjayoun in southern Lebanon, said a civil defence centre was hit in a small town just outside of the Tyre governorate, killing four people and injuring several others.“Questions are being asked about why this particular fire service unit was actually attacked. It is also affiliated with the Islamic Scout Association, so it has a community centre feel to it,” he said.
“Overnight, we saw several air strikes take place around southern Lebanon. Israel isn’t letting up its pressure at all.”
Israel, which has devastated Gaza in 11 months of relentless bombardment, launched an offensive in Lebanon on Monday after months of deadly border exchanges. Nasrallah’s killing on Friday is a dramatic escalation in the conflict between the two sides.
The Ministry of Public Health said Israeli air raids on Lebanon killed 33 people on Saturday, taking the total number of deaths to more than 700 since the bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds began last week. A total of 1,640 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 8, including 104 children and 194 women, the majority in Israeli strikes in the past two weeks. The killing of Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for more than 30 years and built the Lebanese group into a powerful force, is one of the heaviest blows ever dealt by Israel to Hezbollah.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reporting from Beirut said Hezbollah is at a turning point, “both at an organisational level and at the popular level”.
“There is no doubt that Hassan Nasrallah was considered arguably the most powerful man in Lebanon even though he did not hold public office,” she said. “Hezbollah needs to prove that its command and control structure is intact, that its leadership is still able to function.
“What Israel has been doing, its strategy has been to dismantle Hezbollah’s leadership.” (Aljazeera)
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