Israel extends bombardment of Beirut while fighters clash on the border

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israel continued to bombard Beirut’s suburbs overnight and struck a mosque in southern Lebanon as its forces battled Hizbollah fighters on the ground in the border region.

Israeli warplanes also launched a strike on the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli for the first time, killing a Hamas commander, the Palestinian militant group said.

The Israeli military said it had targeted a mosque adjacent to the hospital, adding it was being used by Hizbollah fighters as a command centre.

But a Hizbollah-affiliated hospital in southern Lebanon, The Martyr Salah Ghandour, said it was hit by a strike shortly after the Israeli military issued orders that it be evacuated, according to a statement on Lebanon’s state news agency on Saturday. It said nine staff were injured in the attack in the town of Bint Jbeil.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that at least 28 on-duty medics had been killed in Lebanon in the previous 24-hours.

Israel has issued multiple evacuation orders in recent days, warning people in dozens of towns and villages across the south to move north. It has given similar orders during its war against Hamas in Gaza ahead of major offensives.

Iranian-backed Hizbollah said there were clashes around the Lebanese border town of Odeisseh with Israeli soldiers.

Israel has intensified its assault against Hizbollah over the past two weeks as it has shifted it focus from Gaza to the northern front. It has killed its leader Hassan Nasrallah, launched air strikes across Lebanon and sent troops into the country’s south for the first time in almost two decades.

The escalation has heightened fears about all-out war in the Middle East. The region is bracing for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to an Iranian missile barrage fired at Israel on Tuesday.

Tehran said the missile attack was in response to the assassination of Nasrallah last week and the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

Hizbollah said Israel bombed a convention centre in the southern Beirut neighbourhood of Dahiyeh overnight. The group, which dominates the suburb, used the complex to host events, including rallies to broadcast speeches by Nasrallah.

Almost 2,000 people have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in the past year, according Lebanese authorities, after Hizbollah started firing missiles at Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza.

The majority were killed in the past two weeks, Lebanon’s health minister said. More than 1.2mn people have been displaced, triggering one of the worst crises for the country in decades.

This week there have been indications that Israel has expanded its offensive to include Hizbollah’s civil infrastructure, while also continuing to target the group’s remaining leaders.

The movement is Lebanon’s dominant political force and has a huge network of social programmes and business interests. On Thursday, Israel struck a Hizbollah-linked medical facility in the heart of Beirut, killing at least nine people, including health workers, as well as a building used by the group’s media relations team in the southern suburbs.

The strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern city of Tripoli killed Saeed Atallah Ali, a commander of its Qassam Brigades and his family in the early hours of Saturday, Hamas said.

In northern Israel, air raid sirens were triggered several times as Hizbollah launched barrages of rockets. The Israel Defense Forces said the militant group shot 222 projectiles at Israel on Friday.

It claimed on Friday it had killed 250 Hizbollah fighters, including four battalion commanders, since the start of the ground offensive in Lebanon this week.

Nine Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Hizbollah in southern Lebanon this week as the fighting intensified.

Joe Biden has urged Israel to make a “proportional” response to Iran’s missile strikes, and to avoid targeting Iranian nuclear sites or oil infrastructure. But the president has also made it clear that the US supports Israel’s military riposte.

“The Israelis have every right to respond to the vicious attacks on them, not just on the Iranians but on everyone from Hizbollah to the Houthis,” Biden said on Friday.