Israeli forces appeared to have launched what sources called “limited ground operations” targeting Hezbollah inside southern Lebanon, US and other officials said late on Monday.
“This is what they have informed us that they are currently conducting, which are limited operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the border,” the state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told journalists.
Heavy shelling into Lebanon was taking place along the boundary in the area north of Kiryat Shmona, in an area where Israeli armour and infantry advanced into Lebanon during the 2006 war. Airstrikes continued in Beirut and in at least 10 locations across the south of the country, according to Lebanon’s state news agency.
Reports of a cross-border operation came after Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, told community leaders that the “next phase of the war against Hezbollah will begin soon”.
Israeli media cited government sources who said that the cabinet had approved the next stage of its campaign against Hezbollah, after a meeting chaired by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Earlier on Monday Netanyahu issued a warning to Iran, saying it could strike anywhere in the region at will. “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” he said in a video addressed to the Iranian people.
The Israeli military later declared areas of Metula, Misgav Am and Kfar Giladi in northern Israel a closed military zone.
The US president, Joe Biden, said he was aware of Israel’s plans to launch an operation into Lebanon as he urged against such a move. “I’m more aware than you might know and I’m comfortable with them stopping,” he told reporters at the White House. “We should have a ceasefire now.”
The towns of Marjayoun, Wazzani and Khiam – which sit in a series of interlocking valleys overlooked by steep slopes – were being shelled on Monday night.
One resident in Marjayoun said that a local official had received a phone call ordering residents to evacuate but shelling had started before people could leave the town.
“They called the mukhtar of Marjayoun, and told us we needed to evacuate. But we can’t move, the roads are filled with shelling and airstrikes,” the resident said.
An hour later, the road leading out of Marjayoun was hit by an Israeli airstrike and rendered inoperable, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.
The area, with its scattered villages, and scrubby landscape hiding bunkers and combat tunnels, has long been a base for Hezbollah fighters and was heavily fought over during the last war between Israel and Hezbollah 18 years ago.
Hezbollah said in a statement that it targeted a group of Israeli soldiers who were in the “orchard” near the Lebanese border towns of Odaisseh and Kafr Kila, “achieving confirmed casualties”. Kafr Kila is one of the towns that borders the area that Israel declared a closed military zone on Monday.
Friday’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah – the most powerful leader in Tehran’s “axis of resistance” against Israeli and US interests in the Middle East – was one of the heaviest blows in decades to Hezbollah and Iran.
But Netanyahu and senior military commanders in Israel appear committed to continuing what has become a region-wide effort to kill longstanding enemies.
Seven top military officials and about another dozen senior commanders have been killed in the continuing Israeli air offensive in Lebanon, which IDF officials say is aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s cross-border fire that keeps about 60,000 Israelis from returning to homes that were evacuated last October.
The group’s acting leader, Naim Qassem, said Hezbollah would keep fighting, adding that the commanders killed in recent weeks had already been replaced.
Late on Friday, loud explosions were again heard in Beirut as Israeli warplanes targeted Dahiya, a densely targeted neighbourhood in the southern suburbs. The attacks came shortly after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for residents close to what it said were buildings housing Hezbollah installations.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 95 people had been killed and 172 injured in Israeli strikes across the country on Monday.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese army said it was “repositioning and regrouping forces” amid reports it had withdrawn three miles from the country’s southern border.
Though many analysts caution that senior Israeli officials have repeatedly made threats, there is now acute international concern that a substantial Israeli force could cross the contested border into southern Lebanon and reach Hezbollah’s strongholds within days.
Israeli commentators were quick to recall that previous Israeli incursions into Lebanon have ended without achieving their objectives. The Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer remarked: “Israel always knows how it goes into Lebanon. It’s the exit-strategy it seems to struggle with. This government certainly doesn’t have one.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that any ground incursion could lead to the kind of deadly mission creep that had characterised the previous operations of 1982 and 2006.
“What the hell does Israel mean by a limited [incursion],” he asked. “Is it limited in firepower? Is it limited in time? Is it limited in the employment of forces?”
More broadly, Pinkas doubted Israel’s reported goals of establishing a buffer zone in southern Lebanon that would allow Israeli residents to return to the border region.
“I stress the military importance of going in, doing what you got to do, and going out, right,” he said. “But if this evolves into some kind of a protracted presence in southern Lebanon, then what the hell did you achieve by that?”
Lebanon’s health ministry said on Sunday that more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without saying how many were civilians. The government said 1 million people – a fifth of the population – have fled their homes.
In a three-minute video clip in English, Netanyahu accused Iran of subjugating its citizens and directly threatened its leaders. “There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country …. There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu said.
Addressing the Iranian people, Netanyahu said that Iran’s “tyrants” did not care about their future and that when Iran was free, everything would be different.
An airstrike early on Monday hit an apartment building in central Beirut – the first to strike the heart of the Lebanese capital since the short war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 – and killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small, leftist Palestinian faction. Videos showed ambulances and a crowd gathered near the building on a busy shop-lined thoroughfare in a mainly Sunni district.
Hamas said its leader in Lebanon was killed on Monday in an Israeli strike on the country’s south. Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amin, “a member of the movement’s leadership abroad”, was killed in an airstrike on his home in the al-Bass camp in south Lebanon, a Hamas statement said.
Paris and Washington, joined by Arab and other western and European countries, called last week for Israel and Hezbollah to agree an “immediate 21-day ceasefire” and to “give diplomacy a chance”. Israel dismissed the plan.
