Hezbollah says it has killed and injured Israeli soldiers crossing the Lebanese border
William Christou
William Christou has been reporting for the Guardian from Beirut
Hezbollah has claimed in a statement to have killed and injured Israeli soldiers crossing the Lebanese border near a UN position near the al-Labouneh forest, in the western section of the border area. Hezbollah said that the attack forced Israeli soldiers to withdraw behind the border. These claims have not been independently verified yet.
Israel deployed a fourth division to its northern border today in support of its “Operation Northern Arrow”, which started with an intense aerial campaign on 23 September and expanded on Monday to include ground offensives across the border.
The Hezbollah attack came after its deputy secretary general Naim Qassem said in a speech today that the group is still capable of repelling an Israeli advance into Lebanese territory in the south.
Key events
Netanyahu says Israel has ‘taken out’ former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s successors
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israeli forces have taken out the would-be successors of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, without naming them.
Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded video message:
We’ve degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. We took out thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself and Nasrallah’s replacement, and the replacement of the replacement.
Earlier, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Hashem Safieddine, the man expected to replace Nasrallah, who was assassinated by the Israeli military late last month in Beirut, had probably been “eliminated” (see post at 14.12 for more details).
It was not immediately clear whom Netanyahu meant by the “replacement of the replacement”.
‘No place is safe in Gaza’, UN secretary general says
Here are some more comments from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, who has been addressing the UN.
He was quoted by Al Jazeera as having said:
The nightmare in Gaza is now entering an atrocious, abominable second year. This has been a year of crises. Humanitarian crisis. Political crisis. Diplomatic crisis. And a moral crisis…
International law is unambiguous: civilians everywhere must be respected and protected – and their essential needs must be met, including through humanitarian assistance.
“No place is safe in Gaza, and no one is safe,” Guterres, who has told world leaders that Lebanon is on the brink of becoming a second Gaza, said.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said he has written to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warning him that draft Israeli legislation to prevent the UN Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from working in the occupied Palestinian territory would be a “catastrophe”.
He said:
Such a measure would suffocate efforts to ease human suffering and tensions in Gaza, and indeed, the entire occupied Palestinian territory. It would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.
In July, the Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval to a bill that declares Unrwa a terrorist organisation and proposes to sever relations with the body, which Israel has accused of collaborating with Hamas, something vehemently denied by the organisation.
Unrwa provides education, health and aid to millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, with the agency acting as the backbone of aid operations in Gaza since last October.
The Israeli military says it has detected and intercepted two launches crossing the Gaza Strip, shortly after the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) said it had launched rockets towards Sderot in southern Israel. The PIJ the second largest armed group in Gaza. It rejects any political peace process. More details soon…
Israel tightens restrictions on civilians in Haifa area after Hezbollah rocket attack
Israel’s Home Front Command has tightened restrictions on civilians in the port city of Haifa in the wake of a barrage of rockets launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“The activity scale will be changed from partial activity to limited activity, meaning educational activities are prohibited,” the military said, adding that the rest of the country’s guidelines remain unchanged.
Hezbollah said earlier today it had fired rockets towards the Haifa and Krayot area in northern Israel, having launched “a large salvo of missiles”. About seven people were injured in the attack, according to reports.
The Israeli military said “85 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory”, with the IDF later saying a further 20 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory.
Hezbollah rockets also hit Haifa early on Monday morning, in what was the first direct attack on the city that evaded the military’s usually reliable air defence systems. Several people were reported to have been injured in that attack.
Haifa is Israel’s biggest port and contains petrochemical plants and oil refineries, making it a target for Hezbollah to try to strike.
We reported earlier that the leaders of the US, UK, France and Germany were set to hold talks on the Middle East and Ukraine in Berlin on Saturday (see post at 13.59).
It has since been announced that the US president, Joe Biden, is pulling out of the trip to focus on the response to Hurricane Milton, expected to make landfall as an “extremely dangerous hurricane” in Florida on Wednesday night, local time.
A statement from the White House reads:
Given the projected trajectory and strength of Hurricane Milton, President Biden is postponing his upcoming trip to Germany and Angola in order to oversee preparations for and the response to Hurricane Milton, in addition to the ongoing response to the impacts of Hurricane Helene across the southeast.
The office of Keir Starmer, the UK’s prime minister, said he still plans to travel to Berlin on Saturday for talks with the leaders of France and Germany, two of the three other members of the so called “quad”.
Here are some of the latest images coming out of the newswires from Gaza:
Several civilians have been killed and others injured in Israeli attacks today across the Gaza Strip, Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported.
Several civilians were reported to have been killed at the western entrance to the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
One man was killed and others injured after an Israeli warplane targeted land near the entrance to the Gaza town of Zawayda, according to the Wafa report, which has not been verified by the Guardian.
Elsewhere, three civilians were reportedly injured by an Israeli airstrike on a tower in the the al-Alami area of the Jablia refugee camp in the territory’s north, the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic urban refugee camps.
The Israeli army has surrounded the northern city of Jabalia since Sunday, as well as other nearby neighbourhoods, ordering residents to flee southward towards the so-called “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi, even though it has been targeted in deadly Israeli airstrikes and is severely overcrowded.
The Israeli military claims its forces are in Jabalia to fight Hamas militants, dismantle military infrastructure and prevent Hamas from regrouping.
There have also been reports today of a house being bombed in the al-Rimal neighbourhood in the centre of Gaza city.
Medical sources told Al Jazeera that at least 43 Palestinians in Gaza have so far been killed by the Israeli military on Tuesday.
Prosecutors in the Netherlands are considering a request to open a criminal case against senior Israeli intelligence officials for allegedly interfering with an investigation by the international criminal court (ICC).
The request was filed last week by a group of 20 complainants, most of whom are Palestinian, asking the Dutch prosecution service to examine allegations Israel tried to derail the ICC’s inquiry into alleged crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
According to lawyers for the group, the criminal complaint was filed in response to an investigation by the Guardian revealing how Israeli intelligence attempted over a nine-year period to undermine, influence and allegedly intimidate the ICC chief prosecutor’s office.
The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call prompted the Dutch government to raise concerns earlier this year with Israel’s ambassador to the Netherlands.
You can read the full story by my colleague, Harry Davies, here:
During a briefing with the military’s northern command, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Hezbollah “is a battered and broken organisation, without significant command and fire capabilities, with a disintegrated leadership following the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah”.
He earlier suggested that Hashem Safieddine, the most likely replacement for Nasrallah, has also most likely been killed (see post at 14.12 for more details).
On Friday, the Israeli military said it had killed about 250 Hezbollah fighters, including a number of battalion and company commanders, since the start of its ground invasion. These figures have not been independently verified by us yet.
There is no safe place left in Beirut, city’s mayor says
As we have been reporting, Beirut, Lebanon’s capital city, has been the site of an intense Israeli bombing campaign over the last few weeks, which has flattened residential buildings and heavily populated civilian areas. The Israeli attacks have largely focused on Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut where airstrikes have frequently hit what Israel claimed to be Hezbollah targets. Beirut bombings by the Israeli military last month killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and much of the militia’s top command. Many civilians were reported to have been killed in the attacks on the capital, which have sparked a humanitarian and refugee crisis.
The city’s mayor, Abdallah Darwich, has given an interview to the BBC, in which he says there is “no safe place in Beirut” because of Israel’s attacks.
He said that it is not just Hezbollah strongholds being targeted, but other areas too.
Darwich told BBC News:
You do not know who is living in this building or that building, so you do not know if there is a target there. You can no longer say Beirut is safe. Where the next Israeli target is, nobody knows.
The BBC reports:
Darwich has closed all of the city’s 139 public schools and repurposed them into shelters. But all are now full, holding 51,000 refugees in largely unsanitary conditions. More people are on the streets around Beirut.
After the 2006 war, before Hezbollah became the major force in Lebanon, Gulf states donated vast sums of money to help the country rebuild. Banners hung in Beirut proclaiming, ‘Thank You Qatar’ and ‘Thank You Saudi’.
“Now there is no ‘Thank You Qatar’, no ‘Thank You Saudi’,” the mayor says. “Now nobody is promising to help us rebuild.”
The city was still reeling from the combined effects of the 2019 financial crisis, the port blast, and an earthquake, before this war began.
“Give us peace in Beirut, and we can fix everything,” Darwich says. “But we cannot live in this cycle of destruction.”
Here are some more quotes from Matthew Hollingworth, the World Food Programme country director in Lebanon, who has been speaking to a Geneva press briefing (see his earlier comments at the post at 13.45).
He voiced concern about Lebanon’s food supply, saying thousands of hectares of farmland across the country’s south has burned or been abandoned, adding that harvests will not occur and produce is rotting in fields.
Hollingworth told reporters:
Agriculture-wise, food production-wise, (there is) extraordinary concern for Lebanon’s ability to continue to feed itself.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said as far back as April that Israeli airstrikes had turned southern Lebanon into a “devastated agricultural area” (Hezbollah and Israel have been trading fire since last October – it is over the last few weeks that Israeli attacks on Lebanon have intensified).
“Eight hundred hectares have been completely damaged, 340,000 heads of livestock have died, and about 75% of farmers have lost their final source of income,” Mikati said at the time. “This problem will extend to the coming years,” he added.