The Israeli prime minister says that if the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah has not yet understood Israel’s message after the escalation of attacks in recent days, it will “get it” later.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that if the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, had not yet understood Israel’s message after the escalation of attacks in recent days, the group would “understand” it later.
“In recent days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it could not have imagined,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew in a brief video message.
“If Hezbollah has not gotten the message, I promise it will,” he added in a video released after another night of intense cross-border rocket fire and Friday’s attack in Beirut.
“We are determined to ensure that the people of the north can return home safely. No country can tolerate firing on its residents, on its cities, and we, the State of Israel, will not do so. We will not tolerate it either,” he warned.
Israel significantly stepped up its attacks against the Lebanese group this week, killing at least 17 fighters, including two commanders, in a bombing in Beirut that also left three children and seven women dead, according to Lebanese authorities.
“We are determined to return our northern residents safely to their homes,” Netanyahu continued, referring to the 60,000 Israelis who have been stranded in border communities for some 11 months.
“We will do everything necessary to restore security,” he concluded.
This morning, Hezbollah fired around “150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones” at northern Israel, according to a military statement, causing damage to some houses and fires in the Haifa district, among others, without causing casualties.
Hours earlier, Israel had bombed some 290 Hezbollah “targets” in southern Lebanon, including thousands of rocket launchers and military infrastructure, in an escalation of crossfire between the two since the start of the war in Gaza.
The situation has raised fears of an open war breaking out in the region, although Hezbollah has acknowledged that it does not want to reach that point and has insisted that its attacks against northern Israel would cease if a ceasefire agreement were reached in Gaza.
However, the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government in power in the Gaza Strip announced today a new figure of 41,431 deaths in Palestinian territory since the start of the war with Israel in October 2023.
At least 40 people have been killed in the past 24 hours, the pro-Iranian movement said in a statement, adding that 95,818 people have been injured in the Gaza Strip since the start of the conflict.
Source: Observadora
