Lebanon front with Israel heats up, stoking fears of wider war

BEIRUT/JERUSALEM/AMMAN/GAZA: Weeks of hostilities across the Lebanese-Israeli border have escalated, with growing casualties on both sides and a war of words fuelling concerns of a widening conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Israeli strikes killed two people in south Lebanon on Monday, according to a first-responder organisation affiliated to the Hezbollah-allied Amal Movement.

On the Israeli side, a Hezbollah missile attack on Sunday wounded several workers from the Israel Electric Company and one died of his wounds on Monday, the firm said.

Hezbollah has been trading fire with Israeli forces since its Palestinian ally Hamas went to war with Israel on October 7.

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The exchanges mark the deadliest violence at the border since Israel and Hezbollah fought a month-long war in 2006. So far, more than 70 Hezbollah fighters and 10 civilians have been killed in Lebanon, and 10 people including seven troops have been killed in Israel. Thousands more on both sides have fled shelling.

Until now, violence has largely been confined within a band of territory on either side of the border.

Israel has said it does not want war on its northern front as it seeks to crush Hamas in the Gaza Strip, while sources familiar with Hezbollah’s thinking said its attacks have been designed to keep Israel forces busy while avoiding all-out war.

The United States has said it doesn’t want conflict to spread around the region, sending two aircraft carriers to the area to deter Iran from getting involved. But that has not stopped the escalating rhetoric from Hezbollah and Israel.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Saturday the Lebanon front would “remain active”, and said there was “a quantitative improvement” in the pace of the group’s operations.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hezbollah on Monday not to broaden its attacks.

“This is playing with fire. Fire will be answered with much stronger fire. They should not try us, because we have only shown a little of our strength,” he said in a statement.

Asked at a news conference on Saturday about what Israel’s red line was, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “If you hear that we have attacked Beirut, you will understand that Nasrallah has crossed that line.”

‘Tit-for-tat’

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Sunday, said he was reassured by the “rationalism” of Hezbollah so far.

“We are preserving self-restraint, and it’s up to Israel to stop its ongoing provocations in south Lebanon,” he said.

Lebanon took years to rebuild from the 2006 war and can ill afford another one, four years into a financial crisis that has impoverished many Lebanese and paralysed the state.

Israel has long seen Hezbollah as the biggest threat along its borders. The 2006 war killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

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US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin characterised the violence as “tit-for-tat exchanges between Lebanese Hezbollah and Israeli forces in the north”, predicting Israel would remain focused on the threat from Hezbollah “for the foreseeable future”.

“And certainly no one wants to see another conflict break out in the north on Israel’s border in earnest,” he told reporters in Seoul, although he said it was hard to predict what might happen.

Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center said, “I can definitely see a wider escalation but I am not sure about a full conflict that nobody wants”.

“Nobody wants one on one hand, and I think the US is playing a strong role keeping things under control,” he said.

Jordan’s king rejects any Israeli plan to occupy parts of Gaza

Jordan’s King Abdullah rejected any plans by Israel to occupy parts of Gaza or to create security zones within the enclave, saying the root cause of the crisis was Israel’s denial of Palestinians’ “legitimate rights”, state media said on Monday.

In comments he made at the royal palace, the king was quoted as telling senior politicians that there could be “no military or security solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

He said the war-ravaged enclave of Gaza should not be severed by Israel from the other Palestinian Territories.

The monarch told the politicians that the “root of the crisis was Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and its denial of Palestinians legitimate rights”.

“The solution starts from there and any other path is doomed to failure and more of a cycle of violence and destruction,” he said.

Abdullah said he had long warned about Israeli violations in the West Bank, with which Jordan shares a border, and Jewish settler attacks on Palestinian civilians could “expand the conflict and push the region “to the abyss”.

Jordan is home to a large population of Palestinian refugees and their descendants who fear that Israel could expel Palestinians en masse from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian inhabitants have surged since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel.

Abdullah said this month the only path to permanent peace was revived negotiations on an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

US-brokered negotiations towards a “two-state solution” of Palestinian independence in Israeli-occupied territories have been frozen for almost a decade.

Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital has tanks at its gates

Israeli tanks took up positions at the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital on Monday, the primary target in their battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, where medics said patients including newborns were dying for lack of fuel.

Gaza health ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qidra, who was inside Al Shifa hospital, said 32 patients had died in the past three days, including three newborn babies, as a result of the siege of the hospital and lack of power.

At least 650 patients were still inside, desperate to be evacuated to another medical facility by the Red Cross or some other neutral agency. Israel says the hospital sits atop tunnels housing a headquarters for Hamas fighters using patients as shields, which Hamas denies.

A month of Israel-Hamas war has changed everything

“The tanks are in front of the hospital. We are under full blockade. It’s a totally civilian area. Only hospital facility, hospital patients, doctors and other civilians staying in the hospital. Someone should stop this,” a surgeon at the hospital, Dr Ahmed El Mokhallalati, said by telephone.

“They bombed the (water) tanks, they bombed the water wells, they bombed the oxygen pump as well. They bombed everything in the hospital. So we are hardly surviving. We tell everyone, the hospital is no more a safe place for treating patients. We are harming patients by keeping them here.”

Israel has told civilians to leave and medics to send patients elsewhere. It says it has attempted to evacuate babies from the neo-natal ward and left 300 litres of fuel to power emergency generators at the hospital entrance, but the offers were blocked by Hamas.

Gaza health ministry spokesperson Qidra said the 300 litres would power the hospital for just half an hour, and Shifa needed 8,000-10,000 litres of fuel per day delivered by the Red Cross or an international agency. An Israeli official who requested anonymity said 300 litres could last several hours because only the emergency room was running.

Gunbattle at second hospital

Fighting also took place at a second major hospital in northern Gaza, al-Quds, which has also stopped functioning. The Palestinian Red Crescent said the hospital was surrounded by heavy gunfire, and a convoy sent to evacuate patients and staff had been unable to reach it.

Israel said it had killed “approximately 21 terrorists” at al-Quds in return fire after fighters shot from the hospital entrance. It released footage purporting to show a group of men at the hospital gate, one of whom appeared to be carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

UN agencies observed a minute’s silence on Monday for 101 staff members killed so far in Gaza.

UN agency UNRWA is now housing around 800,000 people in Gaza, or half of those made homeless by the fighting. It said on Monday its emergency fuel depot for the enclave had finally run dry and it would soon be unable to run ambulances, resupply hospitals, provide drinking water or pump sewage.

The more than month-long conflict has polarised the world, with many countries saying that even the shocking Hamas attacks did not justify an Israeli response that has killed so many civilians.