The Netanyahu government orders the suspension of classes in the area and the transfer of hospitals to safe zones underground // Reports that civilians were attacked
▲ Police and emergency workers in Kiryat Bialik, Haifa district, Israel, where a building was damaged during a Hezbollah attack.Afp Photo
Alastair Jamieson
The Independent
The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, September 23, 2024, p. 25
Beirut. Hezbollah yesterday launched more than 100 rockets towards northern Israel, in what one of its top leaders called an open battle of score-settlingSome of the rockets landed near the city of Haifa; one hit a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, where it injured at least three people and set buildings and cars ablaze.
The attack followed Israeli operations in Lebanon that have left dozens dead, including a veteran Hezbollah commander, and an unprecedented attack targeting the group’s communications devices. Air raid sirens in northern Israel sent hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for shelters.
Overnight and into the early morning, some 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones were fired towards Israeli territory.the army said in a statement, adding that the projectiles were aimed towards civilian areaspointing to a possible escalation after previous attacks targeted mostly military targets.
Israeli authorities ordered the suspension of classes in the north of the country and the transfer of hospitals to safe zones underground.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will take whatever action is necessary to restore security and allow people to return to their homes. No country can accept the free delivery of rockets to its cities. We cannot accept it either.he said.
If Hezbollah has not understood the message, I promise it will. We are determined to bring our residents back to their homes in the north of the country.he declared.
Lebanon’s health minister said three people were killed and four wounded in Israeli strikes, without specifying whether they were civilians or combatants.
Naim Kassem, Hezbollah’s substitute leader, said his group is now in a open battle of reckoning with Israel. “We recognize that we are hurt. We are human. But just as we are hurt… you will be hurt too,” Kassem said at the funeral of commander Ibrahim Aqil. He added that the rockets launched yesterday were only the beginning and vowed to destroy the Israeli economy.
On Friday, an Israeli strike in Beirut killed Aqil, 61, and dozens of others, including women and children, and just days earlier a sophisticated attack on Hezbollah caused thousands of pagers and handheld radios to explode.
Aqil had been on the US most-wanted list for years over his alleged involvement in the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the capture of American and German hostages in Lebanon during the civil war in the 1980s.
Just days before the attack in Beirut, a sophisticated operation against Hezbollah caused the explosion of thousands of beepers and walkie-talkies by its militants in Lebanon and Syria, killing more than 40 people and leaving nearly 3,000 wounded. This action was attributed to Israel, both by the Shiite group and by official US sources cited by various media.
Israel did not immediately comment until yesterday, when President Isaac Herzog rejected flat out any link between his country and what happened, adding that Hezbollah has many enemies.
The pro-Iranian armed groups that make up Islamic resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility yesterday for drone attacks against Israel, which for its part said it intercepted several suspicious flying objects from Iraq. During the night, several suspicious flying objects approached Israel from Iraq, the Israeli military reported, saying they were intercepted and no injuries were reported.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire since the outbreak of the Gaza war nearly a year ago, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with Palestinians and its Iran-backed ally Hamas. The low-intensity fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel and hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced hundreds of thousands on both sides of the border.
Until recently, neither side was believed to be seeking open war, and Hezbollah had refrained from attacking Tel Aviv or any important civilian infrastructure. In recent weeks, however, Israel has shifted its attention from Gaza to Lebanon. Hezbollah has said it will only stop its attacks if the war in Gaza ends, but a ceasefire there is looking increasingly elusive.
The war began with Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, in which Palestinian militants killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage. They still hold 100 captives, of whom a third are believed to have died.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. It did not say how many were fighters, but said women and children made up more than half of the dead.
© The Independent
Translation: Jorge Anaya
