LAST UPDATE | 9 Oct
HEZBOLLAH HAS SAID its fighters repelled two Israeli army attempted icursions into southern Lebanon, as Israel intensifies its ground invasion of its northern neighbour.
In two separate statements, the Lebanese group said Israeli troops had tried to enter border areas near Blida in the southeast and Labouneh in the southwest, but were driven back.
Also this morning, the Israeli military said it intercepted two projectiles fired from Lebanon shortly after air raid sirens blared in and around the coastal town of Caesarea, south of Haifa, the city which was the target of a major rocket attack yesterday.
Sirens also sounded elsewhere in northern Israel, a day after the army said the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group had fired 180 projectiles into Israel, mainly at Haifa and the north.
A video posted online by Israeli soldiers showed them raising an Israeli flag in the ruins of the Iran Garden in the Lebanese town of Maroun al-Ras, close to the Irish peacekeepers’ 6-52 position.
The garden, which footage shows has been largely destroyed, was a gift from Iran to the town of Maroun al-Ras after the 2006 Israeli withdrawal from the area. It is a kind of theme park that features a replica of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
Maroun al-Ras has been the site of heavy fighting since the Israeli invasion began. Eight members of Israel’s Golani Brigade were killed by Hezbollah fighters on the first day of incursions across the border.
“The Golani Brigade takes operational control of a Hezbollah combat compound in Maroun El Ras that poses a direct threat to the residents of northern Israel,” the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said in a post on Telegram.
“In southern Lebanon, a combat compound belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization, overlooking border communities in northern Israel, was located during the localized, targeted operations of the Golani Brigade in the Maroun El Ras area.”
Israeli soldiers have posted similar videos from Gaza, raising the Israeli flag, during the war on the Palestinian territory that began a year ago.
Yesterday, the United Nations confirmed that Israeli troops have left their position near the UN peacekeeper bases where Irish peacekeepers are stationed in southern Lebanon.
Irish troops have been hunkering down in bases along the Blue Line at the Lebanon-Israel border as part of UNIFIL.
UNIFIL in Lebanon’s south had warned that Israel’s operations near one of their positions were dangerous and compromised their safety.
The Journal obtained photographs that show Israeli tanks apparently using the Irish outpost at 6-52 inside Lebanon, just a few hundred metres from an Israeli base inside Israel near Avimim.
In a statement issued today, the Defence Forces confirmed “there are currently no IDF personnel or vehicles observed in the vicinity of this Post, having moved north of the Post yesterday evening”.
“The cessation of activity and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from their positions around the Irish post marks a positive development amidst heightened tensions in the region.”
The statement said that last night was “relatively calm” in the area around the base.
This is a message to the people of Lebanon: pic.twitter.com/btMQR0Xwtn
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 8, 2024
In a video posted online by Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, in English, the Israeli Prime Minister addressed the people of Lebanon directly, urging them to “save” their country from Hezbollah, “before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza”.
More than 2,000 people have now been killed by Israeli attacks in the last year, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
UNICEF’s Ettie Higgins told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland today that the agency’s resources are stretched despite planning for a “worst case scenario”.
She said that donor fatigue has set in due to the compounding humanitarian crises around the world, including in Palestine, Sudan and now Lebanon, where more than one million people have been displaced.
She said the mass displacement of people from parts of Lebanon has been the fasted forced displacement she has seen in her career.
“We’re currently now grappling with many of these thousands of people still out on the streets in Lebanon,” she said.
“Every day, we see different waves of displacement as evacuation orders are issued for different locations across particularly southern suburbs of Beirut, but also in the south of the country, where we’ve seen huge destruction that’s just accelerated in the past number of weeks, with thousands of airstrikes, which have forced these people to move.”
She said the UN’s children’s agency “didn’t think that we would hit the worst case scenario, and we didn’t think that it would happen in just a matter of days”.
“This conflict is coming on top of the already very fragile situation in the country,” she said.
Lebanon is hosting around 1.5 million refugees from the civil war in Syria and its economy was already in a dire state before the Israeli bombardment began in late September.
“We’ve had a huge, crippling economic collapse as well that has sent the poverty rate soaring. 98% of Syrians, even pre this war, were living in extreme poverty, not knowing where their next meal would come from,” Higgins said.
She said that the arrival of winter will also make things more difficult for those displaced by the war.
“In the coming two weeks, we’re expecting the weather to turn and it’s especially difficult. Two days ago, I was meeting mothers with newborns living on the sides of streets, living on beaches in Beirut, who were desperate for shelter.”
With reporting from AFP
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