Israeli military orders evacuation of several Lebanese communities near border
An Israeli tank manoeuvres in northern Israel near the Israel-Lebanon border, Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. Picture: AP Photo/Baz Ratner
The Israeli military has warned nearly two dozen Lebanese border communities to evacuate, hours after launching what it said was a limited ground incursion against the Hezbollah militant group.
The warning, posted by the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, specified around two dozen communities in southern Lebanon and asked people to evacuate north of the Awali River, some 36 miles (60km) from the border.
This is farther than the Litani River, which marks the northern edge of a UN-declared zone that was intended to serve as a buffer between Israel and Hezbollah after they fought to a month-long stalemate in the 2006 war.
The army had earlier warned people not to travel south of the Litani, some 18 miles (30km) north of the border. The border region, has largely emptied out over the past year as the two sides have traded fire.
An Israeli military official said the troops were within walking distance of the border, focused on villages hundreds of metres from Israel. The official said there had been no clashes yet with Hezbollah fighters on the ground.
There are between 140 and 150 registered Irish citizens in Lebanon, along with Irish troops serving with Unifil.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin confirmed that the Irish troops were safe.
"[The incursion] is in a different area as to where our troops are located," he said.
"The escalation heightens concerns, but they are safe. They're professional soldiers. Unifil is doing everything it can at the command level to make sure that the peacekeepers are protected in the context of the escalation."
Israeli artillery units pounded targets in southern Lebanon through the night and the sounds of airstrikes were heard throughout Beirut. The official said Hezbollah had launched rockets at central Israel, setting off air raid sirens and wounding a man in his 50s.
Hezbollah said it fired salvos of a new kind of medium-range missile, called the Fadi 4, at the headquarters of two Israeli intelligence agencies near Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military official said Hezbollah had also launched projectiles at Israeli communities near the border, targeting soldiers without wounding anyone.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s top spokesperson, said troops were conducting “localised ground raids” on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon to ensure that Israeli citizens could return to their homes in the north.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel ignited the war in Gaza. Israel has launched retaliatory airstrikes and the conflict has steadily escalated.
In recent weeks, Israel has unleashed a punishing wave of airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon, killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his top commanders, as well as many civilians.
Rear Admiral Hagari said a UN Security Council resolution that ended the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006 had not been enforced and that southern Lebanon was “swarming with Hezbollah terrorists and weapons”.
That resolution had called for Hezbollah to withdraw from the area between the border and the Litani River and for the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers to patrol the region.
Israel says these and other provisions were never enforced. Lebanon has long accused Israel of violating other terms of the resolution.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Lebanese army nor the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, known as Unifil, that Israeli forces had crossed the border.
Unifil said the military had notified it the day before of its “intention to undertake limited ground incursions into Lebanon” and described it as a “dangerous development”.
It noted that any such incursion would also violate the UN resolution and urged both sides to de-escalate.
The Lebanese Army said in a statement on Tuesday that its pullback was part of a regular repositioning of some of its monitoring points in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon's army has historically stayed on the sidelines of major conflicts with Israel, and in the last year of hostilities has not fired on the Israeli military.
Residents in the Lebanese border town of Aita al-Shaab reported heavy shelling and the sound of helicopters and drones overhead. Flares were repeatedly launched over the Lebanese border town of Rmeish, lighting up the night sky.
An Israeli strike in Lebanon early on Tuesday targeted Mounir Maqdah, commander of the Lebanese branch of the Palestinian Fatah movement's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, according to two Palestinian security officials.
His fate was unknown.
The strike hit a building in the crowded Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near the southern city of Sidon, the sources said. It marked the first strike on Lebanon's largest Palestinian camp since cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel broke out nearly a year ago.
Israel has not commented on the strike.
In Syria, three civilians were killed and nine others injured in an Israeli airstrike on the capital Damascus, Syrian state media said on Tuesday citing a military source. Israel's military said it does not comment on foreign media reports.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria for years but has ramped up raids since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel's southern territory on Oct. 7, 2023.
Hamas killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages in its assault on Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Israel in response launched a massive assault on Hamas in Gaza, reducing most of the Palestinian territory to rubble, displacing most of its 2.3 million people and killing more than 41,300 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Israel's operations in Lebanon follow its deadly detonation of booby-trapped Hezbollah pagers, two weeks of airstrikes, and its killing on Friday of Nasrallah.
The intensive air strikes have eliminated several Hezbollah commanders but also killed about 1,000 civilians and forced one million to flee their homes, according to the Lebanese government.
Overnight, a series of strikes hit Beirut's southern suburbs after the Israeli military warned residents to evacuate areas near buildings it said contained Hezbollah infrastructure south of the capital.
In the past 24 hours, at least 95 people had been killed and 172 wounded in Israeli strikes on Lebanon's southern regions, the eastern Bekaa Valley, and Beirut, Lebanon's health ministry said early on Tuesday.
The White House and the US State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Israel's ground operations in Lebanon, but on Monday, US President Joe Biden called for a ceasefire.
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