JERUSALEM – The Israeli military on Thursday warned people to evacuate communities in southern Lebanon that are outside a U.N.-declared buffer zone, signaling that it may widen a ground operation launched earlier this week against the Hezbollah militant group.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces said they had struck around 200 Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including weapons storage facilities and observation posts. Strikes continued overnight when a series of massive blasts rocked Beirut’s southern suburbs. It was not immediately clear what was targeted or if there were casualties.
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The fighting has driven nearly 1.2 million people from their homes in Lebanon, the country's crisis unit said Thursday.
At least nine Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where Israel announced the start of what it says is a limited ground incursion earlier this week. The fighting comes as the region braces for Israel's response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack.
Strikes kill and wound first responders
The World Health Organization reported that 28 health workers were killed in the past day in Lebanon, and access to medical care is becoming limited as three dozen health facilities closed in the south and five hospitals were either partly or fully evacuated in Beirut.
The Lebanese health minister said Israeli strikes that hit nine hospitals and 45 health care centers violate international law and treaties.
“International laws are clear in protecting these people — I mean, paramedics," Firas Abiad said. "Who gave Israel the right to be the judge and the executioner at the same time?”
The Lebanese Red Cross said an Israeli strike wounded four of its paramedics and killed a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south. It said the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted Thursday despite coordinating its movements with U.N. peacekeepers. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Another Lebanese soldier was killed by Israeli fire at an army post in the southern town of Bint Jbeil, according to the Lebanese military, which said it returned fire. A Lebanese security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity according to regulations, said the army post was hit by artillery fire.
An Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Beirut late Wednesday killed nine people, including seven Hezbollah-affiliated civilian first responders. Israel has been pounding areas of the country where the militant group has a strong presence since late September, but has rarely struck in the heart of the capital.
There was no warning before the strike late Wednesday, which hit an apartment not far from the United Nations headquarters, the prime minister’s office and parliament.
Palestinian Health Ministry says 18 killed by Israeli strike in West Bank
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 18 people were killed Thursday in an Israeli strike on the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank. It was the deadliest strike in the occupied territory since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last October.
The Israeli army said the strike killed Hamas’ leader in Tulkarem. Hamas condemned the strike but did not confirm if any of its members were killed.
The military said the strike was carried out in coordination with the Shin Bet internal security service, but it gave no details on the target. Tulkarem is a militant stronghold in the northern West Bank. It remained unclear how many people were wounded in the blast.
Violence has flared across the Israeli-occupied territory since the Israeli-Hamas war erupted last October. Tulkarem and other northern Palestinian cities have seen some of the worst violence. Palestinian militant groups are active across the northern West Bank, areas where the Palestinian Authority has a limited foothold.
Fighting escalates in southern Lebanon
The Israeli military said Thursday that its strikes in Lebanon had killed at least 15 Hezbollah fighters.
There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah. But if the claim is true, it would mark the latest in a string of assassinations of top Hezbollah officials in recent weeks, including its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israeli military also said Thursday that it had killed a senior Hezbollah militant, Mohammed Anisi, who was involved in the group’s development of precision guided missiles. Anisi was killed in an airstrike targeting the group’s intelligence branch in Beirut, the army said.
Hezbollah said its fighters detonated a roadside bomb when Israeli forces entered the Lebanese border village of Maroun el-Ras, killing and wounding soldiers. It was not possible to independently confirm the claims made by either side.
So far, ground clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have been confined to a narrow strip along the border.
But hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes, as Israel has warned people to evacuate from dozens of villages and towns in the south, telling them to relocate to areas that are around 60 kilometers (36 miles) from the border and considerably farther north than the Litani River.
Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the militants were to withdraw north of the Litani, and Lebanon's armed forces were to patrol the border region along with U.N. peacekeepers.
Neither Lebanon's army nor the peacekeepers were capable of imposing any agreement on Hezbollah by force, and Israel says it defied the resolution and built extensive military infrastructure in towns and villages near the border. Lebanon has accused Israel of violating other parts of the resolution.
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah after nearly a year of rocket attacks that began Oct. 8 and displaced some 60,000 Israelis from communities in the north. Israel has carried out retaliatory strikes over the past year that have displaced tens of thousands on the Lebanese side.
In recent weeks, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his top commanders. Hundreds more airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon since mid-September have killed at least 1,276 people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Nearly 2,000 people have been killed and more than 9,000 wounded in Lebanon since the fighting began nearly a year ago.
The vast majority of recent strikes have been in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
Fears of a wider war mount after Iranian missile attack
Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they launched two drones at Tel Aviv overnight. The military said it identified two drones off the coast of the bustling metropolitan area, shooting one of them down while the other fell in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance, which also includes armed groups in Syria and Iraq. They have launched attacks on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians, drawing retaliation in a cycle that has repeatedly threatened to set off a wider war.
The region once again appears on the brink of such a conflict after Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday, which it said was a response to the killing of Nasrallah, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general who was with him, and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, who was killed in an explosion in Tehran in July that was widely blamed on Israel.
Israel and the United States have said there will be severe consequences for the barrage, which lightly wounded two people and killed a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. Military leaders from the two countries have been in regular communication “about what a response to Iran should look like,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Thursday.
President Joe Biden said Thursday evening that he thought all-out war could be avoided.
“I think we can avoid it, but there’s a lot to do yet," he told reporters as he returned to the White House from a visit to areas battered by a recent hurricane. He added that “we're going to help Israel.”
A spokesman for Iran's mission to the UN cautioned against coordinated military action with Israel.
“Should any country render assistance to the aggressor, it shall likewise be deemed an accomplice and a legitimate target,” the spokesman said in a statement Thursday.
Israel says it killed senior Hamas leader in Gaza
The escalating violence in Lebanon has opened a second front in the war between Israel and Iran-backed militants that began nearly a year ago with Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7 attack from the Gaza Strip into Israel.
The Israeli military said Thursday that it killed a senior Hamas leader in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip around three months ago. It said that a strike on an underground compound in northern Gaza killed Rawhi Mushtaha and two other Hamas commanders.
There was no immediate comment from Hamas. Mushtaha was a close associate of Yahya Sinwar, the top leader of Hamas who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 attack. Sinwar is believed to be alive and in hiding in Gaza.
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Jeffery reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press staff writers Abby Sewell and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut and Zeina Karam in London contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war