JERUSALEM: Israel Strikes Hezbollah Targets Urges Safety, Israel unleashed its most widespread wave of air strikes against Hezbollah on Monday (Sep 23) and warned Lebanese citizens to evacuate areas where the armed group was storing weapons, moving closer to all-out war.
“We are deepening our attacks in Lebanon, the actions will continue until we achieve our goal to return the northern residents safely to their homes,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video published by his office on Monday.
“These are days in which the Israeli public will have to show composure.”
He was speaking after the Israeli military targeted Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon’s south, eastern Bekaa valley and the northern region near Syria.
The latest attacks came amid some of the heaviest cross-border exchanges of fire in a conflict raging alongside the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Earlier, Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said that air strikes on houses in Lebanon, in which “Hezbollah hid weapons” were imminent.
Residents of southern Lebanon received calls from a Lebanese number ordering them to immediately distance themselves 1,000m from any post used by Hezbollah, a Reuters reporter in the south, who received the call, said.
Lebanon’s information minister Ziad Makary said his ministry had received a similar call ordering the building to evacuate, but said the ministry would do no such thing. “This is a psychological war,” Makary told Reuters.
A Lebanese person living in Beirut’s Manara area said her family received a call on their landline.
The Saudi embassy is very close, like two minutes walking distance from us, but apparently they are targeting everyone now. It was a long 30-40 second message.”
“Hezbollah is endangering you. Endangering you and your families,” Hagari said.
The UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon had “seen an intensification of bombardments throughout the area of operations, close to the Blue Line but also deeper south,” its spokesperson Andrea Tenenti told Reuters, referring to the line demarcating the Lebanese-Israeli border.
