Two more Hezbollah leaders are thought to be dead as the Israel Defense Force prepares to invade southern Lebanon
The death of Nasrallah is a legacy of the war between Israel and the Middle East, as pointed out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
On Saturday, the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy reiterated calls for a ceasefire, saying in a post on X that he had spoken with the Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati.
The president called Nasrallah’s death “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.” He said that Israel has the right to defend against Hezbollah, Hamas, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups.
The assassination received praise from the country’s military leaders and senior figures. The defense minister said he was a threat to the lives of thousands of Israelis and other citizens. “This action closed a long-standing account with the arch-murderer Nasrallah, whose hands were covered with the blood of thousands of civilians and soldiers.”
“Syrians are more concerned at the moment with getting them to safety, and helping them in the humanitarian sense,” Makki said, while acknowledging the broader impact of the Hezbollah leader’s death. The politics of the Middle East have been part and parcel of Nasrallah’s life.
Thousands of people have left the country in the past week due to repeated Israeli strikes. Danny Makki is a Syrian journalist who is currently in the capital Damascus.
Thousands of reserve soldiers have been called up over the past few days, as Hezbollah continues to trade rockets with Israel at the border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah confirmed that one of its top leaders was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon and offered its sympathies to others who died with him.
It described Nasrallah as “a great martyr, a heroic, bold, brave, wise, insightful, and faithful leader,” and would remain, despite his death, “still among us with his thought, spirit, line and sacred approach.”
Asked about Nasrallah’s killing, however, Biden said the longtime Hezbollah leader’s death was “a measure of justice” for victims of his four-decade “reign of terror.”
To highlight the attack’s potential to ignite an even wider Middle East conflict, the semiofficial Iranian news agency, Mehr, reported that an operational head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan, had also been killed in the strike. Iran has long financed and supported Hezbollah, while also supplying weapons and missile technology to the group.
Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Hezbollah and Hamas consider themselves to be part of the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel.
The assassination of Nasrhood, whom Netanyahu said was an architect of a plan toannihilate Israel, is an essential condition for Israel to achieve its war goals, Netanyahu said in his first public remarks.
The Israeli military ordered curbs on public gatherings in the central part of the country, a sign that the country is bracing for the possibility of Hezbollah and other Iran-supported militias attacking.
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Biden said that Arafat decided to join hands with Hamas in order to open a northern front against Israel.
In a separate statement, Biden noted the operation to take out Nasrallah happened within the wider context of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel.
The U.S., France, the U.K. and other allies have called for a 21-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, even as the prospect of any such agreement appears less and less likely.
Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, in particular, represents another dramatic new development for a conflict that has metastasized across the Middle East region since last October.
The latest exchange of fire, coupled with Israel’s plans to invade southern Lebanon, has heightened fears that a war was about to break out.
Meanwhile, the IDF also said it had intercepted eight projectiles launched from Lebanon into Israel on Sunday, hitting open areas near Tiberias in Israel’s north.
“The IDF continues to attack with force, damage and degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities and infrastructure in Lebanon,” the Israeli military said in a post on X.
The Israel Defense Force said in a statement that it targeted buildings with weapons and military structures.
It was said that Benjamin Netanyahu came back to Israel early from his UN trip as Israel was preparing for an invasion into southern Lebanon.
According to the Israeli military, it carried out a number of additional raids on Hezbollah targets early Sunday, after reports surfaced that two Hezbollah commanders were assassinated in a southern suburb of Lebanon.
Sirens sound in the northern Israeli city of Haifa and nearby towns. Israel said that Haifa has been targeted for the first time in the war.
Sept. 27: In his fiery speech at the United Nations, Netanyahu said Israel is winning on several fronts and would bomb Iran and its proxies anywhere in the Middle East. Many of the delegates in the U.N. hall leave in a public snub at the start of his address — in which he calls the U.N. a “swamp of antisemitic bile.”
Sept. 17: Thousands of pagers — many belonging to Hezbollah members — simultaneously explode across Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 13 people, including some children, and injuring around 4,000, hundreds of them critically. Israel does not seem to publicly credit it for the attack. Israel had just announced a new goal in the war to return tens of thousands of Israelis who had been displaced due to Hezbollah rocket fire near the Lebanon border, signaling it may take further military action against Hezbollah.
Netanyahu was arriving at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on the day that the missile attack was launched. The media office of the rebels said Israeli strikes hit two power plants in the city of Hodeida. According to the Health Ministry of the Houthis, the strikes killed 4 people and wounded 40 others.
The Israeli military said on Sunday it struck a number of targets in Yemen in response to a recent attack. The military said it attacked the power plants and sea port facilities.
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There was a smoldering wreck from Friday’s strike. Smoke rose over the rubble as people flocked to the site, some to check on what was left of their homes and others to pay respects, pray or simply to see the destruction.
President Joe Biden said Sunday that he would speak soon with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and believes that an all-out war in the Middle East must be avoided. “It has to be,” Biden told reporters at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware as he boarded Air Force One for Washington.
In a video of a strike in Sidon, verified by the AP, a building swayed before collapsing as neighbors filmed. One TV station called on viewers to pray for a family caught under the rubble, posting their pictures, as rescuers failed to reach them. There were at least 14 medics killed in the south over the course of two days.
A wave of Israeli airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon have killed more than 1,030 people — including 156 women and 87 children — in less than two weeks, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
Israel says it is determined to return some 60,000 of its citizens to communities in the north that were evacuated nearly a year ago. Although indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel have taken place in the past, a cessation of rocket fire in Gaza is the only thing that will stop Hezbollah.
Kaouk was a veteran member of Hezbollah going back to the 1980s and served as Hezbollah’s military commander in southern Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. The United States announced sanctions against him in 2020.
Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and political party backed by Iran, Israel’s chief regional rival, rose to regional prominence after fighting a devastating monthlong war with Israel in 2006 that ended in a draw.
Hezbollah and Israel’s air strikes in Jordan: The first apparent Israeli airstrike on a Beirut apartment building
Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven from their homes. There are up to four times as many homeless people in shelters as there are in friends or relatives.
Kirby dodged questions about whether the Biden administration agreed with the way Israel was targeting Hezbollah leaders. The White House continued to push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah in the wake of the UN General Assembly last week.
Kirby said that he thinks people are safer if Nasrallah is not walking around. They are going to try to recover. We are waiting to see what they do to fill the leadership vacuum. It is going to be difficult. They have lost a lot of their command structure.
The White House’s national security spokesman John Kirby said that the Hezbollah command structure had been “wiped out” by Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon.
Also early Monday, another strike killed a commander with the militant group Hamas, which has a presence in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps. Hamas said Fatah Sharif and his family were killed in an airstrike on the Al-Buss refugee camp in the southern port city of Tyre.
The al-Jamaa al-Islamiya has not yet confirmed the death of any of their members, despite an earlier claim by the Civil Defense that one of them was killed in the strike.
JERUSALEM — The first apparent Israeli airstrike on central Beirut in nearly a year of conflict leveled an apartment building early Monday. It came after Israel hit targets across Lebanon and killed dozens of people, as Hezbollah sustained heavy blows to its command structure, including the killing of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.