Planned airstrikes on Iran will make the world understand Israel’s military might, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has said.
The Middle East has been braced for more than three weeks for a threatened Israeli response to Iran’s 1 October missile attack, which was in turn a reprisal for Israel’s killing of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Gallant visited aircrews at Hatzerim airbase on Wednesday and made clear that Israel still intended to strike back. “After we attack in Iran, they will understand in Israel and elsewhere what your preparations have included,” Gallant told the crews in a video distributed by his office.
On X, Gallant added more about his exchange with the air force personnel. “In my conversation with them I emphasised – after we attack Iran, everyone will understand your might, the process of preparation and training – any enemy that tries to harm the state of Israel will pay a heavy price,” the minister said.
The extent of Israel’s target list has been the subject of protracted conversations between Israeli leaders and the Biden administration, which has urged them not to strike Iran’s oil industry infrastructure or its nuclear programme. Washington fears a cycle of escalation, particularly in the last two weeks before the US presidential election.
Israel is already fighting on multiple fronts. In Lebanon on Wednesday, Hezbollah confirmed the death of Hashem Safieddine, who was expected to be Nasrallah’s successor. Israel claimed Safieddine had been killed in an airstrike earlier this month, alongside Ali Hussein Hazima, the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence unit.
In the statement, Hezbollah said Safieddine spent most of his life serving the movement and that he “competently managed” the executive council – the highest political decision-making body in Hezbollah. The group pledged to carry on in “that path of resistance and jihad”.
The death of Safieddine, the most senior Hezbollah official killed since the killing of Nasrallah, throws the leadership of the group further into question. The current de facto public face of the group is Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general, but he has not yet been picked as its permanent leader. Despite most of its senior military command and top political leaders having been killed by Israel over the past three months, Hezbollah has said the organisation retains its ability to fight Israel.
Israel carried out airstrikes on Wednesday in Tyre, one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon, which had become a refuge over the past year for thousands of families displaced by fighting further south. Videos showed large plumes of smoke billowing between residential buildings in the centre of the city.
“We’re sitting here terrified. The strikes are near us, the sounds are just next to us. We’re horrified,” said Rita Darwish, a woman who had been displaced to Tyre from Dhayra, a border village, a year earlier. She added that she would flee Tyre “at the first chance” once the bombing stopped.
The strikes on central Tyra, a Unesco-listed port city, were part of Israel’s expanding military campaign in Lebanon that had escalated in the last week. Parts of greater Beirut that had not been hit before, as well as Tyre and Nabatieh, another large city in the south, were now included in Israel’s attacks.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah announced it had carried out 39 operations against Israel, including the downing of two drones, striking six tanks and targeting 19 groups of Israeli soldiers. Fighting continued on Wednesday, with Hezbollah bombing Israeli soldiers in the towns of Odaisseh and Rab Thalatheen in south Lebanon.
The number of strikes carried out each day by the Islamist militant group has significantly increased in recent weeks, with it announcing it had entered into a “escalatory phase” of war against Israel. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a drone attack on the holiday residence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the coastal city of Caesarea on Saturday. Netanyahu was not present at the time of the attack.
On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces accused six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza of “military affiliation” to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reacted with scepticism, saying that “Israel has repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing credible evidence”.
“After killing Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail Al Ghoul in July, the IDF previously produced a similar document, which contained contradictory information, showing that Al Ghoul, born in 1997, received a Hamas military ranking in 2007 – when he would have been 10 years old,” the NGO said in a statement on X.
In the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, the IDF continued to round up Palestinian men as it sought to end resistance in the area, more than a year after the Gaza war began. An IDF statement said at least 150 men had surrendered and had been detained. The UN estimates that over the past two weeks, about 60,000 people have fled from the north of Gaza to the southern end of the coastal strip in the face of Israeli evacuation orders, military strikes and dire shortages of food, water and medicines.
