Updated September 26, 2024 @ 3:07pm
Dimming hopes for a cease-fire, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will continue striking Hezbollah “with full force” and will not stop until all of its goals are achieved. Israel carried out a new strike in the Lebanese capital, which it said killed a senior Hezbollah commander.
Netanyahu spoke as he landed in New York to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting. At the gathering, U.S. and European officials were putting heavy pressure on both sides to accept a proposed 21-day halt in the fighting to give time for diplomacy to avert a potential all-out war.
Hundreds have been killed in Lebanon this week as Israel dramatically escalated strikes, saying it is targeting Hezbollah’s military capacities. Israeli leaders say they are determined to stop more than 11 months of cross-border fire by the militant group, which has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from communities in the north.
Netanyahu said Israel’s “policy is clear. We are continuing to strike Hezbollah with full force. And we will not stop until we reach all our goals, chief among them the return of the residents of the north securely to their homes.”
Just before his comments, the Israeli military said it killed a Hezbollah drone commander, Mohammed Hussein Surour, in an airstrike in the suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the claim of his death. The Health Ministry said two people were killed and 15 wounded in the strike.
The strike gutted an apartment on an upper floor of a residential building in Dahiyeh, the mainly Shiite suburb where Hezbollah has a strong presence, according to Associated Press photos of the scene.
Over the past week, Israel has carried out several strikes in Beirut targeting senior Hezbollah commanders. Earlier in the day, a strike in eastern Lebanon killed 20 people, most of them Syrian migrants, according to Lebanese health officials.
Israel hit 75 sites early Thursday across southern and eastern Lebanon, the military said. After the Beirut explosion, dozens of rockets were fired toward the northern Israeli city of Safed, with one hitting a street in a nearby town. In total, 175 projectiles were fired from Lebanon on Thursday, the military said. Most were intercepted or fell in open areas, some sparking wildfires.
Israel has talked of a possible ground invasion into Lebanon to drive Hezbollah -- an Iranian-backed Shiite group that is the strongest armed force in Lebanon -- away from the border. It has moved thousands of troops the north in preparation. Thousands of Lebanese have fled the south in the past week, streaming into Beirut and points further north.
The escalation has raised fears of a repeat – or worse – of the 2006 war between the two sides that wreaked destruction on large parts of southern Lebanon and other parts of the country and saw heavy Hezbollah rocket fire on Israeli cities.
“We now face the risk of an all-out war. Another full-scale war could be devastating for both Israel and Lebanon,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said after talks with his British and Australian counterparts in London.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was at the U.N. meeting with Israeli officials over the truce proposal. Speaking in an interview with MSNBC, he said major powers, the Europeans and Arab nations were united, “everyone speaking with one clear voice about the need to get that cease-fire in the north.”
“I can’t speak for him,” Blinken said of Netanyahu.
Hezbollah has not yet responded to the proposal for a pause in fighting. Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati welcomed it, but his government has no sway over the group.
Netanyahu’s office downplayed the initiative, saying in a statement that it was only a proposal and Israel would continue to defend against Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon.
One of Netanyahu’s far-right governing partners threatened on Thursday to suspend cooperation with his government if it signs onto a temporary cease-fire with Hezbollah – and to quit completely if a permanent deal is reached. It was the latest sign of displeasure from Netanyahu’s allies toward international cease-fire efforts.
“If a temporary cease-fire becomes permanent, we will resign from the government,” said National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the Jewish Power party.
If Ben-Gvir leaves the coalition, Netanyahu would lose his parliamentary majority and could see his government come toppling down, though opposition leaders have said they would offer support for a cease-fire deal.
Hezbollah has insisted it would halt its strikes only if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel has battled Hamas for nearly a year. That appears out of reach despite months of negotiations led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.
One day after Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel, bringing Israeli counterfire and a cycle of reprisals that has gone on near daily since. Hezbollah says its barrages target Israeli military posts and are a show of support for the Palestinians.
Before this week, the cross-border barrages had killed about 600 people in Lebanon, mostly militants but including more than 100 civilians, and about four dozen people in Israel, roughly half of them soldiers and the rest civilians. The fighting also forced tens of thousands to flee homes on both sides of the border.
Israeli leaders now say they are determined to drive Hezbollah from the border area to allow its citizens to return home. It says its escalated strikes across Lebanon the past week are targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers and other military infrastructure. Sine Monday, strikes have killed more than 690 people in Lebanon, around a quarter of them women and children, according to local health authorities.
Hezbollah in turn has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, saying they are targeting Israeli military positions. Several people in Israel have been wounded. On Wednesday, the group fired on Tel Aviv for the first time with a longer-range missile that was intercepted.
Early Thursday, an Israeli airstrike hit a building housing Syrian workers and their families near the ancient city of Baalbek in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. The Lebanese Health Ministry said 19 Syrians and a Lebanese were killed, one of the deadliest single strikes in Israel’s intensified air campaign. The state news agency had initially reported that 23 people were dead.
Hussein Salloum, a local official in Younine, said most of the dead were women and children.
“We dug through the rubble with our own hands” until a small bulldozer was brought in, Salloum told The Associated Press by telephone. “We had very limited capabilities.”
Lebanon, with a population of around 6 million, hosts nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands who are unregistered — the world’s highest refugee population per capita.
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Mroue reported from Beirut, Lidman from Tel Aviv.
