2024-01-05 19:51:45
The Israeli army and Hezbollah say they have attacked each other again. Fighter jets bombed Iranian-allied Lebanese militia facilities near Majdalsun and Aita al Shaab, the military said on Friday. These were Hezbollah military posts and places from which terrorists had prepared their attacks. Lebanese security sources confirmed the attacks.
Israel’s military said it also registered several rockets that were fired towards Israel. The army then attacked the starting points of the shelling and a command center of the Shiite militia Hezbollah. Israeli artillery shells hit Hula and the outskirts of Tayr Harfa, Jebbayn, Jarin and Al-Bustan, Lebanese security sources said. An Israeli drone also shot at a residential building in Mhaibib. Nothing was initially known about possible victims.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war following the massacre by Hamas terrorists and other extremists in Israel on October 7, there have been almost daily confrontations in the border region between Israel’s army and Hezbollah, which is allied with the Islamist Hamas.
Israel is demanding that the Hezbollah militia withdraw from the border for the safety of its citizens in the north of the country and has threatened that it could use military means to do so if diplomatic efforts are unsuccessful.
Hezbollah is allied with the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas and also provides its top representatives with shelter. Only recently, Hamas’s previous number two, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah publicly vowed retaliation for the killing on Friday. “The murder of Al-Aruri (…) will certainly not go without reaction and punishment,” he said on Friday. He reported that his militia had carried out 670 operations in the border area with Israel since October 8, thereby establishing a “balance of deterrence.” Possible negotiations for an agreement on the border would only take place after the “aggression against Gaza” has ended. “We face a real opportunity to completely liberate every inch of our country,” Nasrallah said.
According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), almost 80,000 people in Lebanon have been forced to leave their homes in the past three months due to ongoing fighting on the border with Israel. Due to increasing fighting in the Lebanese-Israeli border area since the start of the war between Israel and the Islamist Hamas, 76,018 people have been displaced in Lebanon, especially in the south, the IOM said.
According to the report, more than 80 percent of the displaced Lebanese found refuge with relatives, and two percent are housed in collective shelters in the south of the country, especially in the coastal city of Tire and in the Hasbaya region. The remaining residents of the border area have rented apartments or are staying in more remote regions far away from the fighting, the UN organization said. On the Israeli side, according to Israel’s Defense Minister Joav Galant, more than 80,000 Israelis were evacuated from their hometowns in the border area.
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