Deadly Israeli strikes in Beirut and Gaza as Blinken returns to push for peace amid spiraling warfare
Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel Tuesday to make another push for a cease-fire in the close U.S. ally's multi-front war with Iran's so-called proxy groups. Just hours before he landed, air raid sirens pierced the morning quiet in Tel Aviv and operations at Ben Gurion airport were briefly suspended, heralding the latest attempted attack by Hezbollah in Lebanon, this time with about 20 rockets or drones aimed at northern and central Israel, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel has stepped up its assault on Hezbollah in recent days, pummeling offices of a financial institution across Lebanon that the IDF claims funnels Iranian money to the U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group.
One Israeli strike on Monday night hit near the Lebanese capital's biggest hospital, killing at least 13 people including a child and wounding dozens more, according to the country's health ministry. Israel has issued warnings to residents in some parts of Beirut before airstrikes and ordered tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in the Hezbollah strongholds of southern Lebanon.
But residents said there was no warning in the densely populated area around Beirut's Rafik Hariri Hospital before the Monday strike. Many displaced Lebanese civilians have flooded into the area from further south, where Israel is also carrying out ground operations.
The long-time presence of both Hezbollah and the return of Israel's military contravenes United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which says no military can operate in Lebanon except the Lebanese armed forces. That has not been reality, however, for almost two decades. Israel says it was forced to send troops back across the border because the U.N. peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon failed to prevent Hezbollah from entrenching in the region.
Lebanon's Health Ministry says more than 1,500 people have been killed and 1.2 million people driven from their homes across the country since Israel ramped up its attacks on Hezbollah in mid-September, including more than 60 killed between Monday and Tuesday alone.
The IDF says it launched that offensive to halt the relentless barrage of Hezbollah rocket and drone fire across Israel's northern border. The Iran-backed group started firing those weapons at Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in support of its ideological ally Hamas, which had sparked the ongoing war in Gaza the previous day by killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage in the worst terrorist attack on Israeli soil in history.
Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says more than 42,700 people have been killed since the war started, and Israel's latest offensive there has intensified in recent days. Hospitals in the north of the Palestinian territory have filled up with yet more dead and dying civilians, many of them young.
As the Biden administration makes its latest push for a diplomatic resolution to the spiraling conflict, Israel's military has pressed on — determined, it says, to prevent Hamas from regrouping in the decimated enclave. The northern Gaza town of Jabalia has been a primary target of the latest offensive. Video appeared to show people running to help a boy wounded in one recent strike, unaware that a second strike was already on the way.
Health officials said at least 18 people were killed in Jabalia Monday and eight others elsewhere in Gaza by Israeli strikes.
On Tuesday, strikes hit the area around the Kamal Adwan Hospital, just north of Jabalia.
"Bombs were dropped from quadcopters on ambulances in the hospital, but they did not explode. The upper floors of the hospital are now being shot at, and the service has completely collapsed, so no one can enter or leave. There are no blood units or tubes to drain bleeding from the chest. Most of the medical supplies are not available," the Gaza health ministry said in a statement Tuesday. "The senior staff are in a state of extreme danger. People around the hospital are being asked to evacuate, and those who evacuated were shot on the way. The situation is more than catastrophic."
In a statement, the IDF said troops were "continuing combat in the Jabaliya area, while enabling the secure evacuation of civilians from the combat zone, along designated routes. As a result, thousands of civilians have been evacuated. Dozens of terrorists were arrested from among the civilians. In a single strike, IDF troops eliminated ten terrorists that posed a threat and operated adjacent to them."
Emboldened Israeli settlement movement wants to take over Gaza
As the IDF said it had warned civilians to move south away from Jabalia, there is a small, vocal and growing number of Israelis who want all Palestinians in Gaza to be forced out of the territory.
About 20 years ago, Israel's then-government pulled troops out of Gaza, forcing Israeli settlers to leave as well. Just outside Gaza, on the Israeli side of the border, CBS News met far-right Israeli activists and their families whose controversial mission is to resettle Gaza.
"The Gaza population lost its right to be in Gaza on the 7th of October," Daniella Weiss, head of Nachala Settlement Movement, declared to CBS News. She said Israelis' right to live on the tiny parcel of land was "God given."
Under international law, however, Israeli settlement building in the Palestinian territories is illegal, and the U.S. has criticized the current far-right Israeli government for not only allowing it, but encouraging it.
Weiss and the other members of the settlement movement say those rules do not apply.
"The most basic reason is that it's God given," settler activist Ronit Bonomo told CBS News, referring to the land of Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "If it belongs, something that belongs to us, it's not illegal."
The movement is supported by far-right ministers in Netanyahu's government, which has emboldened Weiss' group and nearly a dozen others after many decades on the fringes of Israeli politics.
"I have nothing against a person who's innocent," Aharon Gottlieb, another member of the Israeli resettlement movement, told CBS News. "I just don't believe there are innocent people there."
Asked where the 2.3 million Palestinian residents of Gaza should go, another member, Bonomo, said: "The world is very, very large. They can fit them in. There's not that many of them. There are lots of Arab countries in the world. They have a large amount of land. Why aren't they accepting the Gazans?"
A poll conducted in the spring found that only a small minority of Israelis (fewer than 20%) said they would support Israeli resettlement of Gaza. Even Netanyahu has said several times that it's not a realistic notion.
But the growing movement and its support within Israel's government is yet another element adding to the religious and political tension fueling the deadly conflict across the Middle East, as Secretary of State Blinken comes — for the 11th time over the last year — to try to salvage some semblance of peace.