Israel and Hezbollah Reject Calls for De-escalation Amid Increasing Cross-Border Attacks
International calls for Israel and Hezbollah to distance themselves from full-scale warfare were met with threats on Sunday from both parties to step up their cross-border assaults.
About 150 rockets, missiles, and other projectiles were fired toward Israeli territory overnight on Saturday and early on Sunday, according to the Israeli military. The majority of the missiles came from Lebanon.
Some strikes went farther than in the past, hitting homes close to Haifa and forcing thousands of Israelis into bomb shelters.
Israel claimed to have destroyed thousands of Hezbollah missile launchers as it launched its own strikes on locations in southern Lebanon.
Israel will take “whatever action is necessary to restore security” and allow families to return safely to their homes near the Israel-Lebanon border, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement on Sunday.
Israel, he claimed, had delivered “a series of blows on Hezbollah that it could have never imagined”. Nevertheless, Naim Qassem, the group’s deputy commander, vowed, “Threats will not stop us… We are ready to face all military possibilities.”
“We have entered a new phase, namely an open reckoning” with Israel, Ibrahim Aqil, a high-ranking Hezbollah leader killed in Israel’s Friday raid on Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, said in remarks made during his funeral.
Hezbollah’s Defiance: A New Phase of Conflict
Sheikh Nadeem Qassem informed the grieving that although Hezbollah had been firing for the past three days, Israel had failed in all of its objectives.
He added that Israel has failed to break the group’s resistance and connection to Gaza and that more Israelis would be forced from their homes in the country’s north. Part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” is Hamas, with which Hezbollah is affiliated.
Large crowds surrounded the coffin as it was driven on a raised platform behind a pickup truck, and they lined the streets to follow it.
The Hezbollah supporters in attendance sent a message of strength among the sadness and rage during the funeral, chanting “death to America” among other things.
In the center of Hezbollah, in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahieh, the ceremony was held in a square a short distance from Friday’s airstrike.
According to Lebanese officials, Ibrahim Aqil and fifteen of his men were among the forty-five persons who died in the attack.
Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head and countless enemies. He was wanted by the US due to his suspected involvement in attacks on a Marine base and the US Embassy in Beirut in the 1980s that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
The Israeli strike on Friday also claimed the lives of some thirty civilians, including whole families. Relatives were still there today, waiting to see whether any remains might be discovered at the rim of a large crater.
Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese Minister of Public Works Ali Hamie claimed that Israel is pushing the region toward conflict.
“At the end, Lebanon is not seeking the war,” he informed the BBC from the strike scene.
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