A series of explosions were heard over Beirut’s southern suburbs early on Saturday after the Israeli military demanded evacuations for some areas while Hezbollah said it was engaged in continued clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area.
Israel said on Friday it had targeted the intelligence headquarters of Hezbollah in Beirut and was assessing the damage after a series of strikes on senior figures in the militant group that Iran’s supreme leader condemned as counterproductive.
Media affiliated with Hamas, meanwhile, reported on Saturday that a leader of its armed wing was killed with three family members in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. It named the al-Qassam Brigades leader as Saeed Atallah. Israel did not immediately comment on the strike.
In Beirut’s southern suburbs, a blast was heard and smoke seen early on Saturday, Reuters witnesses said, as the Israeli military issued three warnings for residents of the area to immediately evacuate. The first alert warned residents in a building in the Burj al-Barajneh neighbourhood and the second in a building in Choueifat district, while the third alert mentioned buildings in Haret Hreik as well as Burj al-Barajneh.
Iran-backed Hezbollah said the Israeli army was trying to infiltrate the southern Lebanese town of Odaisseh, where clashes continued.
Israel has been weighing options in its response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Tuesday, which Iran had carried out in response to Israeli military action in Lebanon. Oil prices have risen on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s oil facilities.
The air attack on Beirut, part of a wider assault that has driven more than 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes, was reported to have targeted the potential successor to Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, killed by Israel a week ago. Hashem Safieddine’s fate was unclear immediately afterwards.
The US president, Joe Biden, said on Friday that if he were in Israel’s shoes he would think about alternatives to striking Iranian oilfields, adding that he thought Israel had not yet concluded how to respond to Iran.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told a crowd in Tehran that Iran and its regional allies would not back down. Israel’s adversaries in the region should “double your efforts and capabilities … and resist the aggressive enemy”, Khamenei said in a rare appearance leading Friday prayers, at which he mentioned Nasrallah and called Iran’s attack on Israel legal and legitimate.
The semi-official Iranian news agency SNN quoted Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Ali Fadavi as saying on Friday that if Israel attacked, Iran would target Israeli energy and gas installations.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as Unifil, said on Saturday that it would not leave positions in the country’s south despite what it said was an Israeli request to relocate from some of them. “Peacekeepers remain in all positions and the UN flag continues to fly,” it said.
Lebanon’s government says more than 2,000 people have been killed there in the past year, with most in the past two weeks. A UN spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, called the toll on civilians “totally unacceptable”.
The Israeli military said about 70 projectiles were launched from Lebanon into Israeli territory on Friday evening and were either intercepted or fell in open land.
The US state department said an American was killed in Lebanon this week and Washington was working to understand the circumstances. Kamel Ahmad Jawad, from Michigan, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday, according to his daughter, a friend and the US congresswoman representing his district.
Hezbollah said early on Saturday it was engaged in clashes with Israeli troops in the Lebanon border area, after earlier saying it forced Israeli soldiers to retreat there.
“Israeli enemy soldiers renewed an attempt to advance towards the vicinity of the municipality in the village of Adaysseh” and Hezbollah fighters confronted the attempt “and clashes are continuing”, the group said. Its fighters had forced Israeli troops to “retreat” in the same area, it said earlier.
Hezbollah also said it targeted troops in south Lebanon’s Yarun area with a “rocket salvo”, as well as soldiers in two points across the border with rockets.
Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire for almost a year, with the group saying it is acting in support of Palestinian ally Hamas over the Gaza war. Israel, saying it is targeting Hezbollah in order to make Israel’s northern area safe for the return of displaced people, has intensified its bombardment and this week announced its troops had started ground raids into parts of southern Lebanon.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
