Israel and Hezbollah urged to step back as UN warns of ‘catastrophe’

Israel and Hezbollah both threatened to increase their cross-border attacks on Sunday, despite international appeals for them to step back from all-out war.

Israel’s military said about 150 rockets, missiles and other projectiles were fired at its territory overnight on Saturday and early on Sunday – mostly from within Lebanon.

Some reached further than previous strikes, sending thousands of Israelis to bomb shelters and damaging homes near the city of Haifa.

Israel launched its own strikes on targets in southern Lebanon, which it said destroyed thousands of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would take “whatever action is necessary to restore security” and return people safely to their homes along the Israel-Lebanon border.

He said Israel had dealt “a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined”. But the group’s deputy leader Naim Qassem declared: “Threats will not stop us… We are ready to face all military possibilities”.

Speaking at the funeral of Ibrahim Aqil, a high-ranking Hezbollah commander killed in Israel’s Friday strike on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, he said: “We have entered a new phase, namely an open reckoning” with Israel.

Sheikh Nadeem Qassem told mourners that Israel had failed in all its aims, while the resistance – meaning Hezbollah – had continued firing for the last three days.

He said more Israeli residents would be pushed out from their homes in the north of the country, adding that Israel had failed to break the group’s resistance and connection with Gaza. Hezbollah is allied with Hamas, which is also part of Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”.

Huge crowds lined the streets and followed the coffin as it was driven on an elevated platform on the back of a pick-up truck.

Among the grief and anger at the funeral, there was a message of defiance from the gathered Hezbollah supporters – including chants of “death to America” from the crowd.

The ceremony took place in a square in the southern suburb of Dahieh in Beirut, the heartland of Hezbollah, just a few streets away from Friday’s air strike. (BBC News)

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