The Israeli military carried out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Sunday and signaled that it was stepping up operations in the enclave as it pressed on with its campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The apparent escalation in Israeli military activity — against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah — comes amid rising concern over a broadening war in the Middle East on the eve of the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. That attack prompted Israel to bombard and invade Gaza to fight Hamas.
Early on Sunday, the Israeli military issued a map labeling nearly allof northern Gaza as an evacuation zone, saying this was in preparation for “a new phase” in the war. That came hours after Israeli warplanes attacked Jabaliya, in the northern part of the enclave. The Israeli military said it had surrounded an area where it had identified Hamas fighters and “efforts by Hamas to rebuild its operational capabilities.”
The military also said that it had struck a mosque and a school-turned-shelter in the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah overnight. It described the two locations as Hamas “command and control centers” nestled among civilians, without providing evidence of its claims. The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said 26 Palestinians had been killed and dozens more were wounded.
In recent weeks, Israel has been simultaneously intensifying attacks against Hamas’s allies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israeli airstrikes hit just south of Beirut overnight, sending an orange fireball and thick black smoke into the sky. The attack came less than an hour after the Israeli military issued new evacuation warnings for parts of the area known as the Dahiya, where Hezbollah holds sway and where heavy bombardment in recent days has already forced many residents to flee. It also ordered the residents of 25 villages in southern Lebanon to evacuate and head north.
Israel has been systematically targeting the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran’s other regional proxies. On Saturday, it said it had killed two Hamas commanders in Lebanon as it kept up its fight against the militant group in Gaza.
The escalating fighting has raised fears of all-out war between Israel and Iran, which backs both Hezbollah and Hamas. Last week Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel in retaliation for assassinations — and Israel has vowed to respond.
Deadly attack: A woman died and five more people were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds after an attack near the central bus station in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva, according to Israel’s ambulance service, Magen David Adom. The police described the incident as a terrorist attack and said the assailant had been “neutralized.”
Israel’s preparation:Lessons learned from a 2006 invasion of Lebanon have guided Israel in its current one. Security experts say a political deal is needed to restore calm.
Iranian commander: Members of the Iranian news media are asking: Where is Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, the country’s top general and the commander in chief of its elite Quds Forces? The concerns about General Ghaani followed reports in some Israeli and Arab news media on Saturday that he was either killed or injured in one of Israel’s recent attacks on Beirut.
The Israel police identified the woman killed in Sunday’s attack at the central bus station in the southern city of Beersheba as Sgt. Shira Chaya Suslik, a member of the Border Police Southern District.
Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon has forced thousands of people there to grapple with some urgent questions: What should I pack before I evacuate? What should stay behind? And where can I go that might be safe?
Gazans have some hard-won answers, and some are sharing them on social media.
One of them is Hala Bassam Al-Akhsam, better known as Chef Hala, a Gazan TV and social media personality with 20,000 followers on TikTok. Ms. Al-Akhsam has evacuated from her home in Gaza City three times since Israel invaded Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack last Oct. 7, so she has plenty of experience.
In a recent post, she advised Lebanese evacuees to start with a lightweight pouch for valuables and important documents — gold, cash, diplomas and birth certificates. Make one member of the family responsible for holding onto it at all times. Everyone should have their own small bag of clothes, books, hygiene products and a reusable water bottle. And make sure everyone has a coat, she says, because “winter is coming.”
Once a prolific poster of cooking hacks and recipes, Ms. Al-Akhsam now uploads scenes of the war’s devastation alongside practical advice for staying safe and sane amid chaos. “Have a predetermined safe location in mind,” she said. “A house or an area to move to, without losing time deciding.”
Israeli airstrikes, raids and evacuation warnings have sent hundreds of thousands of Lebanese fleeing their homes, with no certainty of when they would be able to return or what might remain when they do. For the uprooted and those who soon might be, Ms. Al-Akhsam’s displacement tutorials have become a source of solace and solidarity.
Lebanese viewers have reached out with thanks on public forums, and private requests for more specific advice. In one recent video, she obliged with a packing list of essential medicines. “I have faced starvation, famine, and extreme pollution,” Ms. Al-Akhsam explained in an interview. “My struggle throughout this war has inspired me to share with the people of Lebanon what to expect.”
Ms. Al-Akhsam, 36, said she started the tutorials when she first heard that Lebanese, too, were being displaced by Israeli airstrikes. “I really wish someone had explained to me what to do when I first evacuated,” she said. “I didn’t realize what I would need. Once you leave your house, you never know how long you’ll be away. A day? Two days? A month?”
Some Gazans who have used social media to speak to the people of Lebanon focus on solidarity, others on grief. A few have expressed regret that those in Lebanon seem to be paying the price for the support of Hamas by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group.
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@mahmoud__abusalama via Instagram
Mahmoud Abusalama, a 35-year-old landscape photographer turned war reporter from Jabaliya in Gaza, urged his Lebanese viewers on Instagram to record their experiences. “Documentation is crucial for preserving truth,” he said in a recent post, “especially amid the ongoing war.” Before the war, he sought to capture what he described as “the beauty of Gaza.” Now, his posts are full of bloodshed and destruction.
Mr. Abusalama has been evacuated twice, and he has just one thing to say to those who haven’t fled yet: Don’t. “Displacement is humiliating,” he said. As Israel’s invasion pushes on, many in Lebanon may feel they have no choice but to ignore that advice.
After visiting an Israeli military base near the border with Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement that he told the troops there, “A year ago we suffered a terrible blow. In the 12 months since we have been changing the reality from end to end.” He described them as the “victory generation.”
Around 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon over the past year, the majority of them over the past two weeks, the U.N.'s high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, told a news conference in Beirut today. He described the scale of displacement as “enormous for a country like Lebanon,” the population of which is an estimated 5.5 million people.
A Palestinian family arrives in Gaza City after evacuating the Jabaliya area on Sunday.Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military appeared to label the vast majority of northern Gaza as an evacuation zone on Sunday, hours after launching a major raid that it said was targeting Hamas in the area.
The move suggested that Israel planned to step up pressure on war-weary residents of northern Gaza to relocate to the southern part of the territory as it continues to fight Hamas in the north.
“In preparation for a new stage in the war, the army is publishing a new evacuation zones map,” read an image posted on the X account of Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesman.
The post looked similar to evacuation orders that the military has issued in the past, and was interpreted as such by some people.
The title of the accompanying map refers to “new evacuation zones,” with two lines highlighting routes to central Gaza. But the language in the post was contradictory and unclear as to whether the zones would be enforced now or in the future, “as necessary.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are believed to be in northern Gaza, and Israel has prevented displaced people in other parts of the territory from returning there.
Mr. Adraee said later in the day that the announcement was intended only to lay the groundwork for any future evacuation of the north.
Reached by phone, he said that the military hadn’t issued new evacuation orders and that the map merely divided northern Gaza into new blocks that Israel could call on to evacuate in the future.
That was little consolation to some people from northern Gaza, who were uncertain of whether they should leave their homes.
Israel first invaded northern Gaza after weeks of carrying out an intense aerial assault on the enclave in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Since then, it has withdrawn to nearby posts and focused its efforts on other parts of the enclave — only to return again for new operations against Hamas, which has regrouped in its absence. That cycle has repeated, leaving civilians caught in the crossfire in perilous conditions.
Kamel Ajour, 52, a bakery owner in Gaza City, noted that previous evacuation orders had specifically said people needed to leave the area immediately.
“The map is dubious,” he said. “It’s confusing for people.”
Others in Gaza felt similarly. “It’s not clear what it is asking people to do now,” said Yahya al-Masri, 28, who has family in Gaza City.
A female victim of the attack in Beersheba has been pronounced dead, Israel’s ambulance service, Magen David Adom, said in a statement. Five more people were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds and another five were mildly injured by glass and shrapnel, the statement said.
A memorial near Re’im, Israel, in September.Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
People in Israel were bracing on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of the deadly Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, entering a heavily charged week that promises to be filled with mourning as well as fighting.
The Oct. 7 attack prompted Israel’s devastating counteroffensive against Hamas in Gaza, and in the year since the conflict has spread to additional fronts and drawn in allies of the Iranian-backed militant group. With the security situation precarious, rapidly changing restrictions on public gatherings in Israel have added a pall of uncertainty to the anguish around planned memorials for victims of the assault that threw the Middle East into turmoil.
Israel is simultaneously engaged in ground and air offensives against Hezbollah in Lebanon and, once again, Hamas in northern Gaza, five months after its troops left the area. It also is considering a retaliatory strike against Iran, which backs both groups, after Tehran launched about 180 missiles at Israel last week — escalations that threaten to spiral into war between the two powers and engulf the region.
The intensifying fighting and rising tensions have already resulted in the scaling back of a major event planned for Monday, a memorial gathering in a Tel Aviv park organized by families of Oct. 7 victims and of hostages who remain in Gaza. When online registration for the event opened last month, the 40,000 available slots were snapped up within hours.
But with Israel’s Home Front Command restricting outdoor gatherings to 2,000 people in the center of the country, the organizers announced that the event would take place without a mass audience and instead would be live streamed, with only invited members of the bereaved families and hostage families physically present.
And after the Israeli military said it had intercepted two surface-to-surface missiles fired from Lebanon on Sunday morning, some Israelis were questioning the wisdom of allowing any sizable public gatherings. The missiles set off sirens in Israeli towns up to 50 miles south of the Lebanese border and showed that Hezbollah could still pose a significant threat despite Israel’s recent blows to its leadership and arsenal.
Given the chaos and the war that followed the Oct. 7 assault, Israel has not yet held a national day of mourning for the 1,200 people who were killed in the cross-border attacks, most of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. In Gaza, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent fighting, many of them civilians, according to local health officials.
Many Israelis are approaching the anniversary with a mix of dread, fear, and anger at the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has refused to take personal responsibility for the military and policy failures that contributed to the disaster of Oct. 7.
Yariv Mozer, an Israeli filmmaker who directed a new documentary, “We Will Dance Again,” that reconstructs the Oct. 7 attack from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival, said the suspense surrounding Israel’s anticipated attack on Iran was hampering the ability to mourn.
“If Netanyahu decides to attack Iran tomorrow, or the day after, that doesn’t give this country, or we as a people, the moment for grief,” Mr. Mozer said, adding that many Israelis still had a lot of questions about what happened to them on Oct. 7, and harbored a lot of blame toward the government.
The government’s agenda and the escalating fighting, he said, were serving as a distraction from collective mourning, “leading us into different places.”
In the Hebrew calendar, days traditionally begin at sunset the evening before. Though the anniversary is being marked this year according to the Gregorian calendar, special television programming and memorial events in Israel will begin on Sunday evening.
A woman is in critical condition and at least eight others received treatment after a stabbing attack near the central bus station in the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva, a spokesman for Israel’s national emergency service told the country's national broadcaster.
The Israeli military warned residents of 25 towns and villages in southern Lebanon to “immediately evacuate” their homes and head north, in a statement posted by the military’s Arabic-speaking spokesman, Avichay Adraee.
The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for the vast majority of northern Gaza, saying this was in preparation for “a new phase” in the war. “I remind you all that the area of the northern Gaza Strip is still considered a dangerous combat zone,” Avichai Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the military, posted on X. He said Hamas was continuing to try to establish “terrorist infrastructure” there.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are believed to be in northern Gaza. Israel has prevented displaced people in other parts of the territory from returning north.
The Gazan health ministry said 26 Palestinians were killed and dozens more wounded in Israeli strikes on a school and a mosque that were housing displaced families in the central Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said it struck both buildings because Hamas militants were using them as command and control centers, without providing evidence of its claim.
The Israeli military said that overnight it had raided the area of Jabaliya, a city in the northern Gaza Strip, after intelligence indicated “efforts by Hamas to rebuild its operational capabilities” there. The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that several people were killed and wounded in several strikes across the city overnight, but did not provide an exact death toll.
An Israeli unit in July 2006 firing along the front line in northern Israel during fighting with Hezbollah.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, in 2006, was considered a failure within much of the Israeli security establishment.
Its air force had a thin list of targets. Israeli ground soldiers struggled during fighting in southern Lebanon’s rugged terrain. And the war failed to accomplish its stated goals of returning two captive Israeli soldiers and removing Hezbollah from the border region.
“There was a certain degree of trauma from the results of the war,” said Carmit Valensi, an Israeli expert on Hezbollah who served in the military’s intelligence directorate.
Nearly 20 years later, Israel has mounted another assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. This time, a string of successes — attacks that have killed Hezbollah’s leaders, crippled its communication networks and targeted its weapons caches — were a direct result of Israel’s investments in preparing for a future battle with Hezbollah after that foundering performance in 2006, Israeli security experts said.
But as Israeli forces push deeper into Lebanon by land, they will be vulnerable to greater risks, including sophisticated weapons used by Hezbollah. And if the Israeli government fails to develop a clear exit strategy, as it has struggled to do in Gaza, the military could end up fighting a protracted war that stretches its resources to the limit.
Delivering blow after blow to Hezbollah has helped restore Israel’s reputation as a powerful force in the Middle East, but it also has underscored how the country was more ready for war with Hezbollah on its northern border than it was for an incursion by Hamas, which spearheaded the Oct. 7 attacks in the south.
“Hezbollah is 10 times more powerful than Hamas,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Israel’s national security adviser from 2011 to 2013. “But the I.D.F. was 20 times more prepared for Hezbollah than it was for Hamas,” he said, referring to the Israeli military.
Hezbollah was also more ready for a war with Israel than last time, having built an arsenal estimated to contain more than 100,000 rockets and missiles and trained tens of thousands of fighters. And its leaders carefully studied Israel, calculating that Hezbollah could trade back-and-forth attacks with Israel in support of Hamas without setting off an all-out war.
The current Israeli onslaught against Hezbollah showed that was a major miscalculation. Israel escalated its attacks in mid-September, commencing weeks of bombings against Hezbollah and targeting its militants by blowing up their walkie-talkies and pagers. The exploding devices killed or severely wounded both militants and civilians.
Days later, Israel killed several top Hezbollah commanders, including Ibrahim Aqeel, a leader of the Radwan force — elite fighters who Israeli officials had concluded were planning to invade northern Israel.
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A portrait of the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on a destroyed building south of Beirut.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
On Sept. 27, Israel struck an underground compound, killing Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah who turned the group into a powerful political and military force. And on Thursday, Israeli officials said they tried to kill his possible successor, Hashem Safieddine, but as of Sunday, it was not clear if they had succeeded.
At the same time, a wide-scale bombing campaign by the Israeli military struck Hezbollah’s weapons infrastructure and killed its fighters, undermining the group’s ability to respond forcefully. Hundreds of people have been killed in the Israeli airstrikes, including women and children, according to Lebanon’s Public Health Ministry. Its figures do not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
At least four hospitals across southern Lebanon were out of service after Israel’s bombardment, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The St. Therese Medical Center south of Beirut, the capital, also had temporarily suspended services, saying that Israeli strikes in the vicinity inflicted “huge damage.”
General Amidror said a key element of Israel’s intelligence superiority over Hezbollah was its increased deployment of drones that hover in the skies over Lebanon.
An inquiry he conducted into the performance of the military’s intelligence directorate before and during the 2006 war revealed that Israeli drones in Lebanon were being diverted to Gaza, leaving the area with a minuscule number of the unmanned aircraft, he said. The inquiry was at the behest of the Israeli military’s chief of staff, he said.
“I saw that there were very few drones flying over the north,” he said. “I asked myself: Hold on, what’s happening here?”
In the intervening 18 years, the number of drones over Lebanon has grown exponentially, he said.
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An Israeli drone flying over Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, in September.Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
Israel has said it scaled up its attacks against Hezbollah in recent weeks to facilitate the return of roughly 60,000 displaced residents of northern Israel to their homes.
Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser from 2021 to 2023, said Israeli forces focused on gathering intelligence on Hezbollah leaders and their movements as well as its communications systems and secret facilities.
While Hezbollah has long been aware that Israel was conducting reconnaissance on its members, the Israeli military’s repeated strikes on the group’s leaders suggest it did not realize how deeply its ranks had been penetrated.
“We are now seeing how this information gave us an advantage,” said Mr. Hulata, who now is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute based in Washington.
Israel’s intelligence operation against Hezbollah was often able to collect information from secretive meetings without Hezbollah’s knowledge, according to three Israeli security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to communicate with the news media.
Still, celebrations in Israel of its recent successes may be premature. The Israeli forces’ ground invasion into Lebanon, only a few days old, has already exacted a price. On Wednesday, Hezbollah fighters killed nine Israeli soldiers during some of the first fights between the sides since the invasion began. Two more soldiers were killed on Friday in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, the military said.
“The ground invasion will be much more difficult,” General Amidror said. “We’re talking about an organization that is more dangerous, prepared and armed than Hamas. It’s in another league.”
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Mourning in Jerusalem on Wednesday at the grave of an Israeli soldier killed in fighting near the Lebanese border. Credit...Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hezbollah was estimated to have 20,000 active fighters and 25,000 reservists in 2021, according to the C.I.A. Factbook. Many of its fighters also have operational experience, having fought alongside the Syrian government during that country’s civil war. Mr. Nasrallah once claimed Hezbollah had 100,000 armed members.
And while Hezbollah has lost about half of its arsenal in airstrikes, according to senior Israeli and American officials, it has access to guided anti-tank missiles, posing yet another challenge for Israeli soldiers.
Even more concerning, most of the Israeli security experts said, was that it was not clear if Israel had a clear exit strategy from Lebanon, raising fears that the Israeli military might become entangled in a war of attrition.
Those experts also said the Israeli government needed to translate the military’s tactical achievements into a political success by striving for a diplomatic agreement that returns security to the north of Israel. Without such a deal, they said it was unclear when the roughly 60,000 displaced residents will be able to return to their homes.
“At the moment, the political echelon isn’t doing enough work on how we can conclude this issue,” said Mr. Hulata, the former national security adviser. “I fear that our successes could be undone without a clear strategy to achieve a political settlement.”
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Natan Odenheimer from Safed, Israel.
The Israeli military said it intercepted two surface-to-surface missiles this morning that were fired from Lebanon. The missiles set off sirens in Israeli towns up to 50 miles south of the Lebanese border, and showed that Hezbollah can still pose a significant threat despite Israel’s blows to its leadership and arsenal. In recent months Hezbollah has mostly fired shorter-range rockets, antitank missiles and explosive drones into Israel.
Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, head of the Iranian Quds forces, speaks at a ceremony in Tehran in January.Credit...Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via Shutterstock
As Iran awaited a potential counterstrike from Israel on Saturday, senior officials and members of the Iranian news media were all asking a similar question: Where is Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, the country’s top general and the commander in chief of its elite Quds Forces?
Officials in Iran have not yet given a clear answer, Iranian news media reported.
“Public opinion is awaiting news that our general is alive and well,” said Tabnak, an Iranian news site. Another news site, Shahreh Khabar, published a long biography of the general’s decades of service as a veteran of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Quds Force is the branch of the Guards that is tasked with external operations, including overseeing militant groups that Iran supports in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militia groups in Iraq and Syria as well as Hamas in Gaza. The network is regionally known as the “axis of resistance.”
The concerns about General Ghaani followed reports in some Israeli and Arab media on Saturday that he was either killed or injured in one of Israel’s recent attacks on Beirut. The Guards has yet to issue a statement confirming General Ghaani’s whereabouts.
General Ghaani, 67, was last seen publicly at the Tehran offices of Hezbollah, two days after Israel killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon, according to photos posted by Iranian media. The general was notably absent on Friday when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, led a prayer service commemorating Mr. Nasrallah.
Three Iranian officials said General Ghaani had traveled to Beirut last week to meet with senior Hezbollah officials and to help the group recover from the wave of Israeli attacks in Lebanon. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly and asked that their names not be published.
Iranian military officials said on Saturday that all the country’s armed forces had been placed on the highest alert, anticipating Israeli strikes. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Damascus on Saturday, warned in a post on X that Iran’s response to any Israeli attack would be “stronger, and they can put our determination to that test.”
A member of the Guards stationed in Beirut who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information said that the silence from senior Iranian officials about General Ghaani was creating panic among rank-and-file members.
General Ghaani is known for his stern and cold demeanor. He has been assiduous in following through on the projects started by his predecessor Gen. Qassem Suleimani, integrating Iranian-backed armed groups in different countries so that they operate cohesively and are self-sufficient in manufacturing weapons, such as missiles and drones, with the training and help of Iran.
The United States assassinated General Suleimani in 2020 in Iraq.
Iranian media has called on officials to confirm the general’s whereabouts. “If General Ghaani is alive and well, the best way to clarify and assure us that he is well is to publish a short video of him,” said Tabnak.
Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Beirut.
French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on a French radio show on Saturday.Credit...Benoit Tessier/Reuters
President Emmanuel Macron of France called for an “immediate and lasting” cease-fire in Lebanon and said countries should stop shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza, adding to international pressure on Israel to do more to protect civilians and work toward an end to fighting in the region.
“The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering arms for fighting in Gaza,” Mr. Macron said on the French radio show “Etcetera” during an episode that was recorded earlier in the week and that aired Saturday. France is not currently delivering any weapons to Israel, he said.
“I think we are not being heard,” he said of calls for a cease-fire, adding “and I consider it a mistake, also for Israel’s security.”
Later on Saturday, at a summit of French-speaking countries, Mr. Macron announced that 88 Francophone countries voted unanimously to call for a cease-fire in Lebanon as part of a commitment to de-escalate tensions in the region. The United States, Egypt, Qatar and other countries have spent months trying to cobble together a cease-fire in Gaza, but they haven’t been able to get Hamas and Israel to agree.
A U.S. and French-led effort to establish a temporary cease-fire in Lebanon stalled as well.
In a statement late Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dismissed France’s call to stop selling Israel weapons for the war in Gaza.
“Shame on them,” he said, pointing to both France and other Western nations who have called for arms embargoes against Israel. He added, “Let me tell you this, Israel will win with or without their support.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 5, 2024
In response to Mr. Netanyahu’s statement, the French presidency issued a statement late Saturday reiterating France’s support for Israel.
“An immediate cease-fire is necessary in both Gaza and Lebanon to halt the escalation of violence, free the hostages, protect the population and find the political solutions necessary for the security of Israel and everyone else in the Middle East,” the statement read, adding, “France is Israel’s unwavering friend. Mr. Netanyahu’s words are excessive and unrelated to the friendship between France and Israel.”
Israel launched a ground operation earlier this week into Lebanon that targeted Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group. Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with its ally Hamas in Gaza. After a year of tit-for-tat rocket fire exchanges, the fighting has expanded far beyond the Israeli-Lebanese border as Israel targets Hezbollah’s military infrastructure and many of its top commanders. Hezbollah fired an estimated 130 rockets into Israel on Saturday, the Israeli military said.
Israel has come under increasing international pressure to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. The United States in May suspended the export of U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to prevent the U.S.-made weapons from being used in a long-threatened assault on the city of Rafah. Officials said they were not needed by the Israelis and their use could lead to wide civilian casualties.
Those concerns have continued as Israel has ramped up attacks on Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced.
At the International Francophone Organization summit in Paris, Mr. Macron said that France will host an international conference later this month to provide humanitarian aid for Lebanon.
Smoke billowed on Wednesday from an Israeli strike on an area between the Lebanese southern border villages of Kfar Kila and Aadaysit Marjaayoun.Credit...Picture Alliance, via Getty Images
Private homes lie in ruins, their floors collapsed inward. Support beams jut out like broken bones. Red roof tiles are strewn about. And there is not a living soul in sight.
On the edge of the village of Aadaysit Marjaayoun in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel, every third house bears the scars of Israeli military attacks from recent days.
The New York Times was able to gain access to an area close to the border on the Israeli side from which it was possible to see into Lebanon and get a glimpse of the extent of Israel’s operation aimed at crippling Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group that has been firing rockets across the border.
Israeli defense officials have described the incursion, which began earlier this week, as “limited” — saying that the goal was not to hold territory but to neutralize Hezbollah by destroying its frontline positions, and to allow tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the threat of rocket fire to return to their homes.
But since then, Israel has called up more reservists, issued new evacuation warnings across the south of Lebanon and intensified strikes against Hezbollah and its allies.
Peering into Lebanon from the Israeli side of the border, shattered window frames and broken furniture were visible in damaged homes. Roads showed cracks from blasts, and dark smoke rose from a village.
On Israel’s side of the border this weekend, signs of the ground invasion were unmistakable driving north on Highway 90, which stretches all the way to Metula, a town along the border with Lebanon. Rest stops were filled with soldiers: reservists on their way to report for duty, or others taking a break after spending several days stationed in groves near the border that now contain charred patches from Hezbollah rocket strikes.
Approaching the border with Lebanon, the roads become almost completely deserted. Military police soldiers manning roadblocks stop every car, essentially closing off large sections as military zones.
The huge movement of military vehicles, the sirens warning of incoming fire and the empty streets of Kiryat Shmona, Israel’s northernmost city, create an eerie and tense atmosphere. Near the border, tanks roll forward, and army Humvees and trucks bump along a winding dirt road toward the Lebanese towns on the other side.
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