Important Takeaways:
- Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel’s third largest city Haifa on Monday as Israeli forces looked poised to expand ground raids into south Lebanon on the first anniversary of the Gaza war, which has spread conflict across the Middle East.
- Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group fighting Israel in Gaza, said it targeted a military base south of Haifa with “Fadi 1” missiles and launched another strike on Tiberias, 65 km (40 miles) away.
- Hezbollah said it targeted areas north of Haifa in a second salvo of missiles later in the day.
- The military said the air force was carrying out extensive bombings of Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon, and that two Israeli soldiers were killed in border-area combat, taking the military death toll inside Lebanon so far to 11.
- It said it also carried out a targeted strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where a thick plume of smoke could be seen.
- The spiraling conflict has raised concerns that the United States, Israel’s superpower ally, and Iran will be sucked into a wider war in the oil-producing Middle East.
- The Gaza war has given rise to a multi-front Middle East conflict, drawing in Iran’s broader “Axis of Resistance” – Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi militia groups – and sparking several rare, direct confrontations between Israel and Iran.
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Important Takeaways:
- ‘The pain will never leave’: Nova massacre survivors return to site one year on
- As mourners gathered at the site of the Nova music festival to commemorate the victims of Hamas’s attack one year ago, low sobs and murmured prayers were punctuated by the sound of artillery being fired by soldiers into nearby Gaza.
- Relatives gathered around the homemade memorials to the estimated 365 people killed at the festival on that day in 2023, while attack helicopters whirred overhead and occasionally let loose bursts of automatic gunfire toward Gaza, only three miles away from the festival site in Re’im, southern Israel.
- Police had before the ceremony warned attenders that if they heard a siren, they had just seconds to drop to the ground before a rocket from Hamas could hit.
- “Many relatives still come here to try to hug the ground and feel the warmth that remains from their relatives. It’s a pain that will never leave them.”
- Noa Tishby, an Israeli activist and actor, said the Nova site was “where the juxtaposition between good and evil is most apparent”. “That’s really close,” she said, as another artillery round was fired off toward Gaza.
- Many of the families said they strongly supported the Israeli response in Gaza. Few could predict how or when the war would end.
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Important Takeaways:
- Supreme leader defends Iran’s attack on Israel as ‘legitimate’, and calls on Muslim countries to unite.
- “The resistance in the region will not back down even with the killing of its leaders,” Khamenei said, calling Iran’s attack on Israel “legal and legitimate”.
- “The operations were … in return for the heinous crimes committed by this bloodthirsty criminal entity,” he said.
- He said Iran would fulfill its “duty” to allies in a considered manner.
- It was the supreme leader’s first such sermon in more than four years, coming just before the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel
- Iran’s proxies in its “axis of resistance” – Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and armed groups in Iraq – have carried out attacks in the region in support of the Palestinians in the Gaza war.
- Addressing massive crowds, Khamenei issued a rallying call to Muslim nations – “from Afghanistan to Yemen, from Iran to Gaza and Lebanon” – saying they should unite against common “enemy” Israel, which he claimed had deployed “psychological”, “economic” and “military” warfare against them.
- Early on Friday, Israel hit Beirut with a barrage of attacks reportedly targeting senior Hezbollah figure Hashem Safieddine, a putative successor to Nasrallah.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel carried out a series of massive airstrikes overnight, hitting suburbs of Beirut and cutting off the main border crossing between Lebanon and Syria for tens of thousands of people fleeing Israeli bombardment.
- Israel’s military said that Hezbollah had launched about 100 rockets into Israel on Friday, as fighting continued between Israel and the militant group.
- The Israeli military also said Friday that a strike in Beirut the day before killed Mohammed Rashid Skafi, the head of Hezbollah’s communications division. The military said in a statement that Skafi was “a senior Hezbollah terrorist who was responsible for the communications unit since 2000” and was “closely affiliated” with high-up Hezbollah officials.
- Israel said it had targeted the crossing because it was being used by Hezbollah to transport military equipment across the border. It said fighter jets had struck a tunnel used to smuggle weapons from Iran and other proxies into Lebanon.
- Hezbollah is believed to have received much of its weaponry from Iran via Syria.
- Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived Friday in Beirut for meetings with Lebanese officials. He warned that if Israeli carries out an attack on Iran, Tehran would retaliate in a harsh way.
- Israel’s military said Friday that militants in Gaza fired two rockets into Israeli territory, the first time Israel has seen rocket fire from Gaza in about a month.
- The number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel has slowed considerably since the start of the war.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel’s military told residents of more than 20 towns in south Lebanon to evacuate their homes immediately on Thursday as it pressed on with cross-border incursions and struck Hezbollah targets in a suburb of Beirut.
- Hezbollah also carried out new strikes, targeting what it called Israel’s “Sakhnin base” for military industries in Haifa Bay on the Mediterranean coast of northern Israel with a salvo of rockets.
- Israel says the aim of its operations in Lebanon is to allow tens of thousands of its citizens displaced from northern Israel by Hezbollah bombardments during the Gaza war to return home safely
- In Beirut’s southern suburb known as Dahiye, a dense neighborhood where Hezbollah holds sway, several explosions were heard on Thursday and several large plumes of smoke were rising after heavy Israeli strikes.
- Hezbollah said it detonated a bomb against Israeli forces infiltrating a southern Lebanese village and attacked Israeli forces near the border.
- Overnight, Israel bombed central Beirut in an attack the Lebanese health ministry said killed nine people.
- The United States has said Iran will face “severe consequences” and that it would work with Israel, while warning Iran not to act against U.S. forces in the region.
- A growing number of countries were evacuating citizens from Beirut as governments worldwide urged their citizens to get out.
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Important Takeaways:
- The White House on Tuesday said the US believes Iran is preparing an imminent ballistic missile attack against Israel.
- “The United States has indications that Iran is preparing to imminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel. We are actively supporting defensive preparations to defend Israel against this attack. A direct military attack from Iran against Israel will carry severe consequences for Iran,” a senior White House official said in a statement.
- “As of this moment, Israel does not perceive imminent threat from Iran,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.
- During a short video message, Hagari said Israeli military planes are currently “scanning the sky” for any imminent threat from Iran.
- “We are on peak alert both on the offensive and the defensive,” Hagari added, warning Iran that any attack on Israel would “have consequences.” Tensions between Israel and Iran have ratcheted up significantly in recent weeks as Israel has stepped up its efforts against Hezbollah in Lebanon, an Iran-backed militant group.
- Israel on Monday launched a ground operation in southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah.
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Important Takeaways:
- Announcing the incursion in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the IDF said that “limited, localized, and targeted ground raids” had begun several hours earlier.
- It said they were focused on “Hezbollah targets and infrastructure” in a number of Lebanese villages along the border that posed an immediate threat to Israeli towns on the other side of the Blue Line.
- Ground troops operating inside southern Lebanon were being assisted by air and artillery forces
- The start of the IDF’s ground offensive came some two weeks into intensified fighting with Hezbollah, and after Operation Northern Arrows was launched earlier in September to meet the recently declared war goal of bringing residents of the north back to their homes following their evacuation last October under heavy rocket fire from the Lebanese terror group.
- In its statement on Tuesday morning, the military stressed that it was “continuing to operate to achieve the goals of the war and is doing everything necessary to defend the citizens of Israel and return the citizens of northern Israel to their homes.”
- In the hours leading up to the limited raids, several European countries began pulling their diplomats and citizens out of Lebanon.
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Important Takeaways:
- Hezbollah’s deputy chief has pledged that the Lebanese armed group is ready to meet an Israeli ground offensive, despite the killing of its leader and many senior commanders.
- Israel has not hit Hezbollah’s military capabilities, said Sheikh Naim Qassem on Monday as he delivered a message of defiance in a public address.
- Despite the setbacks suffered during the bombardment of Lebanon in recent days, he insisted that the Iran-linked armed group will continue to fight.
- Hezbollah’s operations have continued at the same pace and more since the killing of leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday, Qassem asserted
- For the first time since stepping up its attacks on Lebanon, Israel on Monday struck a central area of the capital Beirut, signaling further potential escalation towards an all-out war.
- Hezbollah’s insistence that it can defend Lebanon was supported by backer Iran, which appears wary of the risk of a wider regional war that any direct confrontation with Israel would carry.
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Important Takeaways:
- “There will be no ceasefire in the north,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on X. “We will continue to fight against the Hezbollah terrorist organization with all our strength until victory and the safe return of the residents.”
- An Israeli warplane struck the edges of the capital Beirut, killing two people and wounding 15, including a woman in critical condition, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
- The strike killed the head of one of Hezbollah’s air force units, Mohammad Surur, two security sources said, the latest senior Hezbollah commander to be targeted in days of assassinations hitting the group’s top ranks.
- Israel has vowed to secure its north and return thousands of citizens to communities there who have evacuated since Hezbollah launched a campaign of cross-border strikes last year in solidarity with Palestinian militants fighting in Gaza.
- Israel’s airstrikes have sharply intensified since Monday, when more than 550 people were killed in Lebanon’s deadliest day since the end of a 1975-1990 civil war.
- The bombing follows attacks last week when pagers and walkie talkies exploded across Lebanon, killing scores of people and wounding thousands including Hezbollah members.
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Important Takeaways:
- A senior Israeli Air Force officer says the airstrikes carried out over the past day against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon are the most extensive the IAF has carried out in its history.
- More than 1,600 Hezbollah sites, mostly homes where weapons were stored, were struck in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley within a day, according to the IDF.
- The senior IAF officer says the widespread airstrikes are “changing the operational situation in the north, changing the reality.”
- He says Hezbollah had two main capabilities that it built up over decades: the elite Radwan Force and its arsenal of rockets, missiles, and drones.
- The top leadership of the Radwan Force, tasked with invading Israel, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday.
- Hezbollah’s rocket and drone capabilities have been targeted across Lebanon in the past day.
- The official says the IAF is working to strike “all of their rocket capabilities, all of them” and that it is “very determined” to do so.
- Hezbollah still has rocket capabilities, but they have been harmed significantly in the recent strikes, the official says.
- The official says Hezbollah has endangered Lebanese civilians twofold: first by placing the weapons in their homes, and second by telling civilians to ignore the IDF’s evacuation calls, he says.
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