Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the people of Lebanon to throw out Hezbollah and avoid “destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”. This as Israel expanded its military campaign against Hezbollah by sending thousands more troops into south-west Lebanon. Its military said 50 Hezbollah members were killed in air strikes on Monday.
Netanyahu issued the warning in a video address to Lebanon, saying, “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. I say to you, the people of Lebanon: Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”
The Israeli leader claimed that Israel’s Defense Forces had killed the successor to Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, but the IDF later said it could not confirm Hashem Safieddine’s death.
The war in the Middle East rages on as Hezbollah launched barrages of rockets towards the Israeli port of Haifa for the third consecutive day, injuring 12 people. The Lebanese health ministry said 36 people were killed and 150 injured in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours.
Lebanese state-run media report “massive destruction” after overnight Israeli air strikes destroyed four residential buildings in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh.
Lebanon’s government says as many as 1.2 million people have fled their homes over the past year. Almost 180,000 people are in displacement centres.
Meanwhile, the World Food Programme said there was “extraordinary concern for Lebanon’s ability to continue to feed itself” because thousands of hectares of farmland had been burned or abandoned.
