Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border

Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border
A man attempts to extinguish flames following a rocket attack from Lebanon, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Sept. 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Short Url
Updated 20 September 2024
Follow

Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border

Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border
  • The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios
  • Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rocket fire in response to overnight bombardment

BEIRUT: Israel said Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets from Lebanon on Friday following overnight air strikes which destroyed dozens of launchers after its leader vowed retribution for deadly sabotage attacks on its communications.
The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios, which killed 37 people and wounded thousands over two days.
Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rocket fire in response to overnight bombardment which people in south Lebanon described as among the fiercest so far.
“Some 140 rockets were fired from Lebanon within an hour,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
The military said that overnight its jets hit infrastructure and “approximately 100 launchers” ready to be fired.
Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed, without elaborating.
Residents of Marjayoun, a Lebanese town close to the border, said the bombardment was among the heaviest since the border exchanges began in October last year.
“We were very scared, especially for my grandchildren,” said Nuha Abdo, 62. “We were moving them from one room to another.”
Clothing store owner Elie Rmeih, 45, said he counted more than 50 strikes.
“It was a terrifying scene and unlike anything we have experienced since the escalation began.
“We live in fear of a wider war, you don’t know where to go.”
The communications device explosions and intensifying air strikes came after Israel announced it was shifting its war objectives to its northern border with Lebanon.
For nearly a year, Israel’s firepower has been focused on Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, but its troops have also been engaged in near-daily exchanges with Hezbollah militants.
International mediators have repeatedly tried to avert a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah and staunch the regional fallout of the Gaza war started by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Hezbollah maintains its fight is in support of Hamas, and its leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Thursday that the attacks on Israel would continue as long as the war in Gaza lasts.
Speaking for the first time since the device blasts, Nasrallah warned Israel would face retribution.
Describing the attacks as a “massacre” and a possible “act of war,” Nasrallah said Israel would face “just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not.”
The cross-border exchanges have killed hundreds in Lebanon, mostly fighters, and dozens in Israel, including soldiers. Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have fled their homes.
Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Hezbollah will pay an increasing price” as Israel tries to “ensure the safe return” of its citizens to border areas.
“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” he said.
Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security” was a dangerous development that could “signal a wider war.”
Speaking ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the attacks set for Friday, he said Lebanon had filed a complaint against “Israel’s cyber-terrorist aggression that amounts to a war crime.”
Senior UN officials have also expressed concern about the legality of the Israeli sabotage.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called the blasts “shocking,” and said their impact on civilians was “unacceptable.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres said it was “very important... not to weaponize civilian objects.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been scrambling to salvage efforts for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal, called for restraint by everyone.
“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would endanger the goal of a Gaza ceasefire, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy expressed “deep concern” over the rising tensions and renewed a call for Britons to leave Lebanon, saying the “situation could deteriorate rapidly.”
Hamas’s October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Out of 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.
In the latest Gaza violence, the territory’s civil defense agency said an air strike on a house in Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people. Another six people, including children, were killed in a separate strike on an apartment in Gaza City, it added.
The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation found the pagers that exploded had been booby-trapped, a security official said.
Lebanon’s UN mission concurred, saying in a letter that the probe showed “the targeted devices were professionally booby-trapped... before arriving in Lebanon, and were detonated by sending emails to the devices.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the pagers that exploded were produced by the Hungary-based BAC Consulting on behalf of Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. It cited intelligence officers as saying BAC was part of an Israeli front.
A government spokesman in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary.”


Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Updated 6 sec ago
Follow

Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
  • “We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” Netanyahu said

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump over the past few days about the “Iranian threat” to Israeli security.
“In the last few days, I have spoken three times with President-elect Donald Trump... Talks designed to further tighten the strong alliance between Israel and the US,” Netanyahu said, quoted in a statement issued by his office.
“We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” he added during a weekly cabinet meeting, according to the statement.
Netanyahu also said he had talked to Trump about “great opportunities before Israel in the field of peace and its expansion.”
The United States is Israel’s top ally and military backer, and the election came at a critical time for the Middle East amid wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Analysts believe Netanyahu had hoped for a Trump return to the White House, given the longstanding personal friendship between the two as well as the former president’s hawkishness on Israel’s arch-foe Iran.
During his first term, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and helped normalize ties between Israel and several Arab states under the so-called Abraham Accords.


Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor

Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor
Updated 10 November 2024
Follow

Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor

Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor
  • “An Israeli air strike killed three people in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
  • “The Israeli attack targeted (Hezbollah) figures in the building,” said the monitor which has a network of sources inside Syria

DAMASCUS: An Israeli strike on an apartment belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah group killed three people Sunday in a stronghold of pro-Iran groups south of Damascus, a war monitor said.
“An Israeli air strike killed three people in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
“The Israeli attack targeted (Hezbollah) figures in the building,” said the monitor which has a network of sources inside Syria.
It said that two locations “where Hezbollah members live” near the Sayyida Zeinab municipality were hit.
Syria’s official SANA news agency reported an “Israeli aggression targeting a residential building in the Sayyida Zeinab” area that killed and injured an unspecified number of people.
On Saturday, four pro-Iran fighters were among five people killed in Israeli strikes in north and northwest Syria, the Observatory reported.
Since Syria’s civil war broke out in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, mainly targeting army positions and fighters including from Hezbollah.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on the strikes, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.


Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Updated 49 min 40 sec ago
Follow

Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
  • The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region
  • It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on Sunday killed 23 people, including seven children, in the village of Almat north of the capital Beirut.
AFPTV footage showed rescuers rummaging with their bare hands through the wreckage of a house that had been completely razed, pulling out bodies wrapped in blankets while an excavator moved the rubble.
The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region. It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon, which Israel has heavily bombed since late September in its war against the Iran-backed movement.
“The Israeli enemy strike on Almat in the Jbeil district killed 23 people including seven children, in an updated but not final toll,” the health ministry said in a statement.
It also said body parts had been recovered from the site and were being identified.
A pile of broken concrete and the twisted metal structure that made up the roof lay at the bottom of a staircase leading to the destroyed house, AFP images showed.
Hezbollah lawmaker Raed Berro, one of the members of parliament representing the Jbeil district, was at the site of the strike and denied Israeli claims that Hezbollah members or weapons were embedded among civilians.
“Important military and security figures are usually on the frontlines... not at the rear,” he told AFP,
“Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women,” he said.
Facebook user Ali Haydar posted a picture of the home, which he said belonged to his family, before it was destroyed. He added that people displaced from the eastern Baalbek region had sought refuge there.
“There were 35 relatives of ours from Baalbek in the house” including women and children, he said.
“Most of them have been martyred” in the strike, Haydar added.
The area was cordoned off by Lebanese security forces and Hezbollah members in civilian clothing, an AFP correspondent at the scene saw.
Dozens of people packed their belongings in their cars and fled the village, the correspondent said.
The health ministry also said Israeli strikes killed three Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers in south Lebanon.
Earlier, Lebanese official media reported an Israeli strike on a house in the main eastern city of Baalbek, which was not preceded by an Israeli army evacuation warning.
“Enemy aircraft launched a strike on a house in the Al-Laqees neighborhood” of the city, the state-run National News Agency said.
Israel intensified its air campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah bastions in Lebanon on September 23 and a week later sent in ground troops.
The escalation came after nearly a year of low-intensity, cross-border attacks by Hezbollah in support of its ally Hamas following the Palestinian Islamists’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
More than 3,130 people have been killed in Lebanon since the cross-border exchanges began, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, most of them since September 23.


UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media
Updated 10 November 2024
Follow

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

TEHRAN: The chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, will visit Iran in days for talks with senior officials, Iranian state media reported on Sunday.
“The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency will arrive in Iran on Wednesday ... at the official invitation of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
Grossi will meet Iranian officials on Thursday, the agency added.
The IAEA confirmed Grossi’s visit to Iran this week, without specifying the date in a post on X.
It said the visit would include talks with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
The agency also quoted Grossi as calling for “substantive progress” on a March 2023 deal that had outlined basic cooperation, including on safeguards and monitoring.
In a September interview with AFP, Grossi said Iran was showing “willingness” to re-engage on the nuclear issue, but it was not willing to walk back on a decision it took to ban some of the IAEA’s inspectors.
Iran withdrew the accreditation of several inspectors last year, a move the UN agency described at the time as “extreme and unjustified.”
Tehran had said then its decision was a consequence of “political abuses” by the United States, France, Germany and Britain.
Grossi last visited Iran in May, when he called for “concrete” measures to help bolster cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program at a news conference in Isfahan province, home to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
His visit this month will come after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
During his first term in office, Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from a pivotal nuclear deal that aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Efforts mediated by the European Union have failed to bring Washington back on board and to get Tehran to again comply with the terms of the accord.
Iran has rolled back its commitments to caps on nuclear activities under the deal, and tensions have repeatedly flared between Tehran and the IAEA over its compliance.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, who took office in July, has favored reviving that agreement and called for ending his country’s isolation.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was “not looking to do damage to Iran” but noted that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran has always denied having ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon, insisting its activities are entirely peaceful.
On Saturday, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif urged Trump to reassess his “maximum pressure” policy which has seen the US impose punishing sanctions on Tehran.
He blamed that policy for leading to the surge in enrichment levels “to reach 60 percent from 3.5 percent.”
Enrichment levels of around 90 percent are required for military use.
rkh/mz/jsa


Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
Updated 10 November 2024
Follow

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
  • They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed
  • In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.

Paris: After jihadists jailed him in 2014, Iraqi religious scholar Muhammad Al-Attar said he would sometimes pull his prison blanket over his head to cry without other detainees noticing.
Daesh group extremists arrested Attar, then 37, at his perfume shop in Mosul in June 2014 after overrunning the Iraqi city, hoping to convince the respected community leader to join them.
But the former preacher refused to pledge allegiance, and they threw him into prison where he was tortured.
In his group cell of at least 148 detainees at Mosul’s Ahdath prison, at times “there was nothing left but to weep,” Attar said.
But “I couldn’t bear the thought of the younger men seeing me cry. They would have broken down.”
So he hid under his blanket.
Daesh, also called Daesh, seized control of large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq and declared a so-called caliphate there in 2014, implementing its brutal interpretation of religion on inhabitants.
The militants banned smoking, mandated beards for men and head-to-toe coverings for women, publicly executed homosexuals and cut off the hands of thieves.
They threw perceived informants or “apostates” into prison or makeshift jails, many of whom never returned.
Attar’s story is one of more than 500 testimonies that dozens of journalists, filmmakers and human rights activists in Syria and Iraq have collected since 2017 as part of an online archive called the Daesh Prisons Museum.
The website, which includes virtual visits of former jihadist detention centers and numerous tales about life inside them, became public this month.
The project is holding its first physical exhibition, including virtual reality tours, at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN’s culture and education agency, until November 14.
Syrian journalist Amer Matar, 38, is director of the web-based museum.
“IS abducted my brother in 2013, and we started to look for him,” he told AFP.
After US-backed forces started to expel jihadists from parts of Syria and Iraq in 2017, “I and my team got the chance to go inside certain former IS prisons,” he said.
They found thousands of prison documents from the group whose caliphate was eventually defeated in 2019, but also detainee scratchings on the walls.
Etched inside the football stadium in the Syrian city of Raqqa, for example, the team found prisoner names and Qur’anic verses, as well as lyrics from a 1996 television drama about peace eventually prevailing.
Inside one solitary cell, they discovered exercise instructions to keep fit in English.
Matar says he was detained twice at the start of the Syrian civil war, in a government jail for covering protests against President Bashar Assad.
“I too would write my name on the wall because I didn’t know if I’d get out or if they’d kill me,” he said.
“People usually write their names, cries for help or stories about someone who was killed,” he added.
“They’re messages into the future so that people can find someone.”
Matar and his team decided to film the former prison sites and archive all the material within them before they disappeared.
“Many were homes, clinics, government buildings, schools or shops” that people were returning to and starting to repair, said Matar, who is now based in Germany.
They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed, he said.
In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.
Younes Qays, a 30-year-old journalist from Mosul, was in charge of data collection in Iraq.
“To hear and see the crimes inflicted on my people was really tough,” he said, recounting being particularly shocked by the tale of a woman from the Yazidi minority who was raped 11 times in IS captivity.
Robin Yassin-Kassab, the website’s English editor, said the project aimed to “gather information and cross-reference it” so it could be used in court.
“We want legal teams around the world to know that we exist so that they can come and ask us for evidence,” he said.
Matar has not found his brother.
But within the coming year, he hopes to launch a sister website called Jawab, “Answer” in Arabic, to help others find out what happened to their loved ones.