Israel presses air strikes as Beirut awaits truce proposal

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Israeli air strikes pounded Beirut’s Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs for a second consecutive day on Wednesday, as Lebanon waited to hear Washington’s latest ceasefire proposals after a U.S. official expressed hope a truce could be reached.

More than seven weeks since Israel went on the offensive against Iran-backed Hezbollah, midmorning air strikes levelled half a dozen buildings in the Beirut suburb known as Dahiyeh and killed eight people in Dawhit Aramoun, a village south of the capital. The dead included three women and three children, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

“They used to hit Dahiyeh at night, now they are doing it in daytime. Things are intensifying day after day,” said Hassan Moussa, 40, speaking in Beirut, adding that Israeli air strikes had also widened to areas such as Aramoun.

Israel launched a major air and ground offensive against the heavily armed Hezbollah in late September after nearly a year of cross-border conflict fought in parallel with the Gaza war.

The Israeli military said its air force had destroyed nine Hezbollah weapons storage facilities and command centres in strikes in the Beirut area, and that Hezbollah fired 40 projectiles into Israel on Wednesday.

It said later that a heavy barrage of rockets was fired from Lebanon at Israel, where sirens sounded in the central areas. There were no immediate reports of any damage or casualties.

White House envoy Amos Hochstein, the U.S. official who has led several fruitless attempts to broker a ceasefire over the last year, told Axios that he thought “there is a shot” at a truce in Lebanon soon. “I am hopeful we can get it.”

His comments point to a last-ditch bid by the outgoing administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to secure a Lebanon ceasefire as diplomacy to end the Gaza war appears adrift, with mediator Qatar having suspended its role.

The United States and other world powers say a ceasefire in Lebanon must be based on U.N. Security Council resolution 1701 which ended a war between the sides in 2006. The resolution demands that the areas of south Lebanon near the Israeli border be free of any weapons other than those of the Lebanese state.

Israel long complained it was never implemented, pointing to Hezbollah weapons and fighters at the border. Lebanon in turn accused Israel of violating the resolution, with Israeli warplanes regularly violating its airspace.

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a political ally of Hezbollah and endorsed by it to negotiate, was quoted as saying that Lebanon was awaiting concrete ceasefire proposals and had not been informed officially of any new ideas.

“What is on the table is only Resolution 1701 and its provisions, which must be implemented and adhered to by both sides, not by the Lebanese side alone,” Berri, who helped negotiate the 2006 truce, told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

Israel wants the right to intervene itself to enforce any ceasefire if it deems it necessary, noting the presence of U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon had not stopped Hezbollah from building forces in the area.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in Wednesday’s Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, which residents have been largely evacuated.

The Israeli military earlier issued a statement on social media saying it would act soon against targets in the area, warning residents they were located near Hezbollah facilities.

Tuesday’s Israeli air strikes, also carried out midmorning, flattened around a dozen buildings in Dahiyeh.

Hezbollah said it used drones to attack Tel Aviv’s Hakirya military base for the first time. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on Hezbollah’s statement and no sirens were reported by the military in Tel Aviv.

On Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said there had been “a certain progress” in ceasefire talks over Lebanon, though the main challenge would be enforcement.

Israel’s new Defence Minister Israel Katz said there would be no ceasefire or arrangement in Lebanon that did not include Israel’s right to enforce and act on its own against Hezbollah.

Since hostilities erupted a year ago, Israeli attacks have killed at least 3,365 people in Lebanon, the majority in the last seven weeks, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Its figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Hezbollah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and soldiers in northern Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and southern Lebanon over the last year, according to Israel.

A Hezbollah attack on Tuesday killed two people in the city of Nahariya in northern Israel. Hezbollah later claimed responsibility for a drone attack that it said was aimed at a military base east of Nahariya.

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Israeli military strikes killed at least 22 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, as Israeli forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.

Residents said Israeli forces besieged shelters housing displaced families and the remaining population, which some estimated at a few thousand, ordering them to head south through a checkpoint separating two towns and a refugee camp in the north from Gaza City.

Men were held for questioning, while women and children were allowed to continue toward Gaza City, residents and Palestinian medics said.

Israel’s campaign in the north of Gaza, and the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area, has fuelled claims from Palestinians that it is clearing the area for use as a buffer zone and potentially for a return of Jewish settlers.

“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement and destruction,” said Saed, 48, a resident of Beit Lahiya, who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday.

“North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

Saed was referring to the 1948 Middle East Arab-Israeli war which gave birth to the state of Israel and saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their hometowns and villages in what is now Israel.

The Israeli military has denied any such intention, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he does not want to reverse the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. Hardliners in his government have talked openly about going back.

It said forces have killed hundreds of Hamas militants in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun during its new military offensive, which began more than a month ago. Hamas and the Islamic Jihad armed wing claimed killing several Israeli soldiers during ambushes and anti-tank rocket fire.

Efforts by Arab mediators, Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have so far failed to end the war in Gaza, with Hamas and Israel trading the blame for the lack of progress.

Speaking on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel “has accomplished the goals that it set for itself” by taking out Hamas’ leadership and ensuring the group is unable to launch another massive attack. “This should be a time to end the war,” he said.

“We also need to make sure we have a plan for what follows,” he said, “so that if Israel decides to end the war and we find a way to get the hostages out, we also have a clear plan so that Israel can get out of Gaza and we make sure that Hamas is not going back in.”

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Blinken’s comments showed: “We are facing one enemy and that the U.S. enmity against the Palestinian people is no less than that of the occupation.”

On Tuesday, the United States stressed at the United Nations that “there must be no forcible displacement, nor policy of starvation in Gaza” by Israel, warning such policies would have grave implications under U.S. and international law.

Medics said five people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit a group of people outside Kamal Adwan Hospital near Beit Lahiya, while five others were killed in two separate strikes in Nuseirat in central Gaza Strip where the army began a limited raid two days ago.

In Rafah, near the border with Egypt, one man was killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli air strike, while three Palestinians were killed in two separate Israeli air strikes in Shejaia suburb of Gaza City, medics added.

Later on Wednesday, an Israeli strike on a house in western Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip killed eight people, medics said.

Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, Palestinian health officials say, and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble, where more than two million Gazans are seeking shelter in makeshift tents and facing shortages of food and medicines.