[If you want to be hated, do something hateful.]
Thousands Flee Israeli Attacks
A Syrian family sits with their belongings in the back of a truck as they wait in a traffic jam in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon on Sept. 23.Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images
Israeli strikes against Hezbollah killed at least 356 people, including women and children, and injured more than 1,200 others across Lebanon on Monday, according to Lebanese Public Health Minister Firass Abiad. The operation was Israel’s deadliest barrage on Lebanon since the two fought a full-scale war in 2006. Israel is “not waiting for the threat to come,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday. “We’re pre-empting it.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has accused Hezbollah of transforming entire Lebanese communities into militant bases to attack Israel and support Hamas’s efforts in Gaza; both Hezbollah and Hamas are backed by Iran. On Monday, the IDF hit more than 1,300 sites in southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, which borders Syria, to target the group’s weapons sites.
“We advise civilians from Lebanese villages located in and next to buildings and areas used by Hezbollah for military purposes, such as those used to store weapons, to immediately move out of harm’s way,” IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said. Israel also sent around 80,000 messages on international numbers to warn residents to evacuate.
Thousands of Lebanese have since fled the south. Cars headed toward Beirut jammed the main highway out of the major port city of Sidon in the country’s largest exodus in almost 20 years. The Lebanese government ordered schools to close on Monday and Tuesday, the country’s Red Cross mobilized “all ambulance stations” to respond to the rising death toll, and United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon said Israel’s attacks are a “grave concern” for civilians’ safety.
The Israeli onslaught came just one day after the United States publicly warned Israel, which is still fighting in Gaza, against “opening up a second front” in Lebanon. “We’re saying this directly to our Israeli counterparts,” U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday. “We don’t believe that escalating this military conflict is in [Israel’s] best interest.” The U.S. Defense Department announced on Monday that it is deploying “a small number” of additional U.S. forces to the Middle East, while Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran will continue to back Hezbollah until the United States stops arming Israel.
Monday’s strikes were the latest cross-border attacks to hit the region since a suspected Israeli operation detonated thousands of communications devices used by Hezbollah militants last week, killing at least 39 people and wounding nearly 3,000 others. “We have entered a new phase, the title of which is the open-ended battle of reckoning,” Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem said. Israeli Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said on Monday that the IDF is “preparing for the next phases” of the conflict.
On Sunday, Hezbollah launched around 150 strikes into northern Israel to retaliate for an Israeli assault on Friday that killed at least 45 people, including a top Hezbollah commander.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has ordered its 190,000 members to stop using all communication devices, fearing that Israel could use them to launch similar attacks to the ones carried out in Lebanon. According to a senior Iranian security official on Monday, the IRGC is conducting a large-scale operation to inspect all devices—most of which are either homemade or imported from China and Russia—and has begun an investigation into mid- and high-ranking IRGC personnel to ensure none are secretly Israeli agents. “This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families,” the official told Reuters.