Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, the 8th of October, called on the Lebanese people to throw out Hezbollah and avoid “the destruction and suffering we see in Gaza” as Israel expands its invasion against Hezbollah, sending thousands of troops into a new area in south-west Lebanon, while claiming that its forces killed 50 Hezbollah members on Monday but Hezbollah fired rockets into the Israeli port of Haifa for the third day in a row, wounding 12 people, reports the BBC.
The Lebanese Ministry of Health said 36 people had been killed and 150 injured in Israeli attacks in the last 24 hours.
In a video address to the Lebanese people, Netanyahu said: “You have a chance to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a protracted war that will lead to the destruction and suffering, we are seeing in Gaza.
I say to you, the people of Lebanon: Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”
Netanyahu also claimed that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had killed the successor of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but the IDF later said it could not confirm the death of Hashem Safieddine.
The IDF reported on Tuesday new air strikes against Hezbollah targets in Beirut and other areas of Lebanon, claiming the death of senior Hezbollah commander Suhail Husseini. Although Hezbollah did not comment, this strike, if confirmed, would be the latest in a series of heavy blows that Israel has dealt to the group, with similar recent strikes killing Hassan Nasrallah and most of the group’s military commanders.
Despite three weeks of intense Israeli strikes and other attacks, which Lebanese officials say have killed more than 1 400 people and displaced 1.2 million others, Hezbollah has remained resilient.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, in a defiant televised address broadcast from a secret location, insisted that Hezbollah had overcome recent “painful blows” from Israel and that its capabilities were “fine”.
For the first time, Kassem did not mention an end to the Gaza war as a precondition for an end to attacks against Israel. Instead, he expressed support for the “political efforts” of the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament to reach a ceasefire.
“Once a ceasefire is reached, diplomacy can look at all the other details”, he said.
It was not clear whether this implied a change in Hezbollah’s position.
The speech coincided with the firing of more than 100 rockets into Haifa Bay in Israel, as well as the Lower, Central and Upper Galilee regions.
The IDF stated that most of the rockets were intercepted and there were no serious casualties.
After almost a year of cross-border fighting with Hezbollah, Israel has stepped up its offensive to secure the return of residents displaced by the continuous rocket, missile and drone strikes from Lebanon that began after Hezbollah supported Hamas in the Gaza conflict that began in October 2023.
Meanwhile, the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon and the head of the UN peacekeeping force warned in a joint statement of a “catastrophic” humanitarian crisis.
As reported 1.2 million people have fled their homes in the last year, 180 000 are in shelters and 400 000 have fled to war-torn Syria, which UN refugee agency called “tragically absurd”.
While the World Food Programme expressed “extreme concern” about Lebanon’s ability to sustain itself as farmland is reportedly destroyed.