Israel launches new strikes in Beirut despite U.S. warning over scale of attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah
Tel Aviv — Just hours after the Biden administration warned Israel over the expanding scope and scale of its military strikes on Lebanon's capital, the Israeli military said its fighter jets flew to the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh and struck an underground Hezbollah weapons cache. Dahiyeh, considered a stronghold of the Iran-backed, U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group, has been hit by Israeli missiles previously, but the strikes Tuesday night were the first in five days.
The overnight attack was Israel's fourth on the Lebanese capital since it started targeting top Hezbollah officials in the country in mid-September. Israeli airstrikes on Oct. 10 killed at least 22 people and injured more than 120 others in a particularly deadly 24-hour period.
A couple weeks earlier, a massive Israeli strike on Dahiyeh killed Hezbollah's senior leader Hassan Nasrallah, who had led the group for more than 30 years.
Lebanese officials say the strikes have killed at least 2,350 people and wounded almost 11,000 others since Israel's offensive against Hezbollah ramped up about a month ago.
In light of that fast-rising civilian death toll, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday that the Biden administration had "made clear that we are opposed to the [IDF's Beirut] campaign the way we've seen it conducted over the past weeks."
That message was delivered in a letter to Israeli officials from Washington, in which the U.S. government also told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the flow of humanitarian aid into the war-torn Gaza Strip must increase dramatically within 30 days, or Israel could see a halt in the flow of American weapons and military funding.
At the beginning of October, after about a week of airstrikes, the Israel Defense Forces launched ground operations in southern Lebanon — also a Hezbollah stronghold. Since then, the IDF has shown local and international media tunnel complexes it says were made and used by Hezbollah to move and store fighters and weapons.
"We are focusing only on several kilometers from our border to make sure that this area is clean," IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told journalists recently in a Lebanese village just a few miles from the Israeli border. "We're not going to Beirut."
In one deserted village in the border region, homes were dark and pockmarked with holes from bullets and artillery. An Israeli flag fluttered nearby.
The IDF showed journalists a two-story home that had its façade blown off, and the entrance to a tunnel the Israeli troops said stretched more than 2,000 feet into a hillside. Inside the tunnel, Hagari said Israeli troops found sleeping quarters, a fully equipped kitchen and a cavern with three motorcycles and cases of water.
Asked how Israel intended to prevent Hezbollah from returning to the region, he said, "occupation is not the word to be used."
He said Israel wasn't "looking to demolish" anything apart from "Hezbollah terror infrastructures, tunnels, arms, weapons, like we're hitting now."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said repeatedly that the goal of IDF operations in Lebanon — announced as "limited, localized, and targeted ground raids" — is to halt Hezbollah rocket and drone launches at Israel, enabling about 70,000 displaced Israelis to return to their homes near the northern border.
At least as many people have been displaced in southern Lebanon, and the United Nations said this week that, across the country, some 400,000 children had been forced to flee from their homes amid Israel's military operations.
The IDF said in a statement that Hezbollah had launched more than 90 rockets or drones across the border on Wednesday alone, adding that it would, "continue to defend the State of Israel and its people against the threat posed by the Hezbollah terrorist organization."
