Thursday, October 3, 2024, 9:04 p.m.
Israel applies in Lebanon the strategy used in Gaza. Yesterday the army ordered the evacuation of around twenty towns in the south of the country, all of them above the Litani River, and the World Health Organization (WHO) reported the death of 28 health workers in the last 24 hours, frequent situations. in the Strip since October 7. Clashes were intense on the border between Hezbollah and Hebrew troops and, for the first time since the start of the war, Israel killed two Lebanese army soldiers.
The Israelis insist that this new operation in Lebanon is “limited”, but there are already five divisions mobilized. The hand-to-hand clashes on Wednesday left eight soldiers and dozens of militiamen dead, according to the army, which last night reported a new fatal casualty: Captain Ben Zion Falach, 21, a member of the 202nd Israeli Parachute Battalion. He also died on Wednesday in a combat in the south of the country.
The Defense Forces ordered the new evacuation yesterday. This area is outside the area delimited by the United Nations after the 2006 war and the order opens the door to a large-scale operation because it includes towns such as Nabatieh, with 50,000 inhabitants.
The director of the Carnegie Middle East Center for strategic studies, Maha Yahya, noted in her X account that “Israel has ordered the mass exodus and forced displacement of at least a quarter of a million Lebanese in twenty-four hours, while dealing with bomb their homes and make their towns uninhabitable. Gaza 2.0 in sight. The number of internally displaced people in the last year reaches one million people, according to authorities, and represents a source of pressure for Hezbollah, which also uses displaced Israelis from the north as a psychological weapon against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets into the north of the Hebrew State and reported an attack on an enemy tank in Netua, an Israeli town located opposite Aita al-Shaab. The pro-Iran militia also claimed that, for the second day, it attacked soldiers near Odaisseh, the site of Wednesday’s deadly ambush, and detonated a device as troops passed in Maroun al-Ras. The army reported more than 200 airstrikes in the area against enemy positions.
The intensity of the conflict increases with the land campaign and the WHO reported the death of 28 health workers in one day. «Many other workers do not show up for their jobs. “They fled the areas where they work because of the bombing,” said World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “This is severely limiting service delivery in a mass trauma situation,” he lamented.
“Nor do the dead rest”
The tension in the south is accompanied by daily operations in Beirut, which for the second time in less than a week reached a central neighborhood of the capital. A missile killed nine people from a health organization close to Hezbollah in Bashoura, a popular neighborhood located next to Parliament and the UN headquarters. The bombing completely affected the Muslim cemetery, where municipal workers worked all day to repair the damage to the tombs. “They don’t even let the dead rest,” lamented the person in charge of this Ottoman-era cemetery in which, among many others, the former Lebanese prime minister Shafiq al-Wazzan is buried.
This bombing in Bashoura came accompanied by others in the southern neighborhoods of the capital, including one against the intelligence headquarters of the Shiite militia, according to the army, and another against the press center where journalists register before work in areas under the control of the Party of God. The aviation also punished the surroundings of the airport where they destroyed a warehouse. Attacks on Beirut now occur from the air and sea.
Lebanon is the central point of Israeli operations, which also extend to Gaza and Syria, all with the response to Iran on the horizon with the launch of 181 ballistic missiles. The Israelis are trying to impose a kind of military encirclement on Hezbollah by land, sea and air so that it cannot receive weapons. The Beirut international airport is operational, but Israel has the final say on which flights can land and in the last 48 hours attacks on Syrian territory have intensified because the Israelis consider that this is the main gateway for weapons entry for the Shiite militia
In this context of open war, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, announces his arrival in Beirut, if his flight from Tehran receives the Israeli green light.
Israel has moved its military center of gravity to Lebanon, but it has not forgotten Gaza, where there are bombings every day and the death toll exceeds 41,000. The military reported that it had been able to confirm the deaths of three senior Hamas officials in an airstrike three months ago. Among the Islamists reached is Rawhi Mushtaha, a person close to the missing Yahya Sinwar, leader of the Islamist movement, who was considered a kind of prime minister in the Strip.
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