Young men rearrange their tent as they shelter in Martyrs' Square after being displaced by Israeli airstrikes, on Sept. 29 in Beirut, Lebanon.Carl Court/Getty Images
Israeli warplanes attacked Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen on Sunday, keeping up a ferocious assault as Iran’s allies across the Middle East scrambled to regroup in the wake of the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israel Defence Forces said that dozens of aircraft hit Houthi targets in Yemen, including power plants and a Red Sea seaport used to import oil.
At the same time, the IDF’s attacks on Lebanon continued at a relentless pace. The IDF said Sunday that it had killed Nabil Kaouk, a member of Hezbollah’s central council, on Saturday, a day after Mr. Nasrallah was killed in a massive air strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hezbollah confirmed his death, marking another blow to the Iran-backed militant group’s ability to wage war against Israel. Targets in the Bekaa Valley in northeast Lebanon were also hit.
Witnesses on Monday reported the first Israeli airstrike in central Beirut in nearly a year of conflict, according to Reuters.
Dozens of people in the country were reportedly killed in Sunday’s attacks and hundreds of thousands of people have fled southern Lebanon since the Israeli escalation began.
Carolina Riskala, a 38-year-old who runs a small café in the city of Naqoura, just five kilometres from the Israeli border, said most of the nearby villages were evacuated. She said she has been sleeping for the past three days on the kitchen floor of her café – which is directly opposite a United Nations peacekeeping base – because she’s afraid that even driving to her home could make her a target of Israeli fire.
“There are three Christian villages nearby that don’t have electricity, water or internet because there’s a shortage of diesel fuel,” Ms. Riskala said in an exchange of text messages. “Everyone is talking about an invasion. My country is bleeding.”
Similar situations were unfolding all across southern Lebanon on Sunday.
The fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began on Oct. 8, when Hezbollah began launching rockets and drones at northern Israel in what it said was an act of solidarity with its ally, the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched a surprise invasion of southern Israel a day earlier. After nearly a year of tit-for-tat fire, Israel says that its escalated assault on Hezbollah is the only way to make it safe for roughly 60,000 Israeli citizens who fled the fighting to return to their homes in northern Israel.
Later on Sunday, Israeli warplanes launched a massive attack on the Yemeni ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa, which are under the control of the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. Israeli media reported that “dozens” of Israeli warplanes – including mid-air refuelling craft – took part in the operation.
IDPs – internally displaced people – are crowded into a park in central Beirut to escape the Israeli bombing in the southern parts of the city and its suburbs.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
Israel also kept up its pounding of the Gaza Strip over the weekend, continuing the war it launched in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, which left more than 1,100 Israelis dead and saw more than 200 Israelis and foreigners taken hostage to Gaza. Just more than 100 hostages are still being held somewhere in Gaza, though at least 35 of them are believed to have died in captivity, according to a count by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
More than 41,600 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed over 359 days of war, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, including at least 11 who were killed Sunday in a series of strikes across the territory. Four died in a strike on a disused school in the northern city of Beit Lahiya. Israel says that Hamas uses civilian buildings for military purposes, an allegation the group has repeatedly denied.
Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel Aviv-based pollster, said Mr. Netanyahu – who returned Saturday from addressing the UN General Assembly in New York – had likely ordered the flurry of Israeli military activity with an eye on the coming U.S. presidential election. No U.S. presidential candidate, she said, could be seen abandoning Israel if Iran decided to match Mr. Netanyahu’s escalations and launch a full-bore counterattack.
“There has been lots of speculation over the years that Netanyahu’s ultimate dream is to pull America directly into this conflict – and it seems like Israel’s actions are continuously on the verge of provoking a full-out war,” Ms. Scheindlin said.
“He knows that this is a very sensitive moment when the U.S. would have no choice but to get involved, because it can’t be seen to stand by if there’s a very serious war in the region.”
In Iran, officials mourned the death of a senior member of the Revolutionary Guards killed alongside Mr. Nasrallah, and Tehran requested a UN Security Council meeting over Israel’s attacks. Sources told Reuters that after the killing of Mr. Nasrallah, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was moved to a secure location.
Israel’s top general, Herzi Halevi, said on Sunday that Israel could hit its enemies wherever they were. “We know how to reach very far, we know how to reach even farther, and we know how to strike there with precision.”
Regarding Lebanon, Gen. Halevi said the strategy was to keep up the pressure on the Shiite militia. “Hezbollah has been hit very hard in the last month, the last two weeks, and the last three days. It has lost its head, and we need to keep hitting Hezbollah hard.”
The Israeli attacks, preceded by evacuation orders to civilians, have created a humanitarian crisis that threatens to overwhelm tiny Lebanon, which has a population of 5.3 million. The Lebanese Health Ministry on Saturday said that 400,000 people had been internally displaced since Israel began its attacks on its northern neighbour last week and the number has almost certainly climbed since then.
Fearing an Israeli invasion and more air strikes, Lebanese have been fleeing the deep south, along the Israeli border, in droves. They are also leaving south Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.
The northern stretch of the main route from Beirut’s Rafic-Hariri airport, about seven kilometres south of the city, was lined with cars that were double- and triple-parked. Many of them were being used as shelters for families, since tents and hotels were not available.
Ahmad Ossman, third from left, and his family are among the internally displaced people living out of their car in Beirut after fleeing the bombing of their homes. Mr. Ossman was working close to his home in the Tahwitat El Ghadir suburb, near Beirut airport, when he heard explosions at about 4 p.m. on Thursday. His mother called him and told him to rush home.Eric Reguly/The Globe and Mail
The extended family of Ahmad Ossman, 40, a carpenter, was living in two small cars parked on a street near the seafront. Four family members were in one car, a Nissan; four in the other, a Hyundai.
Mr. Ossman was working about a kilometre from his house, located in the Tahwitat El Ghadir suburb near the airport, when he heard explosions at around 4 p.m. Thursday. His mother called him and told him to rush home.
“A bomb landed 50 metres from our house and wrecked it,” he told The Globe and Mail. “We put everyone in the cars, eight of us, and left. Everyone was screaming. We were so lucky that no one was in the house at the time.”
A nearby park in the centre of Beirut was filled with internally displaced people. There, members of the Golden Star charity, most of them Bangladeshi, were handing out food and water to dozens of men, women and children and collecting garbage.
“We left our home not far from the airport only an hour ago,” said Hassan Alsabre, who is Syrian and a construction worker. “Our area first got hit on Friday and again today.”
Migrant workers queue for a meal at the Saint Joseph Jesuites Fathers Church, which was turned into a shelter to house families fleeing their homes as a result of Israeli attacks, in Beirut on Sept. 29.FADEL ITANI/AFP/Getty Images
Embassies, including those of Canada and the United States, are urging their citizens to leave Lebanon as soon as possible while a few commercial flights exist – most airlines have cancelled services to Beirut. On Sunday, the U.S. embassy warned that “the ability of U.S. government personnel to reach travellers to provide emergency services is extremely limited.”
Some passengers on a half-full Middle East Airlines flight from Rome to Beirut on Sunday were heading to Lebanon to retrieve family members and take them out of the country. One was a Lebanese citizen, Youssef Saleh, 30, who is the director of YME Construction in Calgary.
He told The Globe that, a year ago, his wife and five young children moved to the Bekaa Valley to be close to family members and learn about their Lebanese heritage. They will all head back to Calgary in a few days.
“I’m worried about their safety,” he said. “The other day, they could hear the bombs go off and felt the house shake. The closest bomb to them landed only a few minutes away by car.”
Men sleep in Martyrs' Square after being displaced by Israeli airstrikes, on Sept. 29 in Beirut, Lebanon.Carl Court/Getty Images
On Sunday, Reuters reported that the body of Mr. Nasrallah, who had led Hezbollah for 32 years, had been found. The report said that “Nasrallah’s body shows no signs of injury, and it appears that the cause of death was the intensity of the explosion.”
His funeral, for which a date had not been set earlier Sunday, is expected to be attended by tens of thousands of people.