Beirut/Jerusalem – Israel’s army chief told troops on Wednesday to be prepared for possible entry into Lebanon as Israeli fighter jets bombarded Hezbollah targets across the border.
“You can hear the planes here; we are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry, but also to continue striking Hezbollah,” Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi told a tank brigade, according to a statement issued by the military.
“We are not stopping. We will keep attacking and harming them everywhere,” Halevi said.
“To do this, we are preparing for the course of the maneuver, and the sense is that your military boots, your maneuver boots, will enter enemy territory,” Halevi said.
“Your entry there with force… will show (Hezbollah) what it is like to meet a professional combat force,” he said.
“You are coming in much stronger than them, much more experienced than them; go in, destroy the enemy there, and go destroy the infrastructure,” Halevi said.
“These are the things that will allow us to safely repatriate the residents of the north later.”
51 KILLED, 220 WOUNDED
In Beirut, Lebanon’s health minister said 51 people were killed and more than 220 injured Wednesday, on the third day of major Israeli raids across the country.
“Since this morning 51 people have been killed and 223 injured in the various strikes” in the country, Firass Abiad told reporters.
Hezbollah sources said that they have hit several military targets inside Israel, including Mossad’s headquarters outside of Tel Aviv. However, this could not be confirmed owing to the Israeli Military censorship law. It says: “The Israeli Military Censor has the power to prevent publication of certain news items. The censorship rules largely concern military issues such as not reporting if a missile hit or missed its target, troop movements, etc.”
In Washington, US President Joe Biden warned Wednesday of the possibility of an “all-out war” in the Middle East as Israel put troops on alert for possible entry into Lebanon and the war in Gaza grinds on.
“An all-out war is possible,” Biden told ABC chat show “The View.” “What I think is, also, the opportunity is still in play to have a settlement that could fundamentally change the whole region.”
CALL FOR RESERVE BRIGADES
Back in Jerusalem, the Israeli military said on Wednesday it was calling up two reserve brigades to the north, where its forces are involved in cross-border clashes with the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
“The IDF (military) is calling up two reserve brigades for operational missions in the northern arena,” the military said in a statement.
It said the move would “enable the continuation of combat against the Hezbollah terrorist organization”.
The statement did not provide details on the new brigades being called up.
An Israeli infantry brigade typically has about 1,000 to 2,000 soldiers, while an armored tank brigade has about 100 tanks.
90,000 DISPLACED
The United Nations said Wednesday that some 90,000 people had been displaced in Lebanon this week, as Israel pounds what it says are Hezbollah targets across the country and the Lebanese group attacks Israel.
Since Monday, the UN’s International Organization for Migration has recorded “90,530 newly displaced persons”, a statement said.
Among them, “many of the more than 111,000 people displaced since October… are likely to have been secondarily displaced”, a statement from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs added, referring to the start of the cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Israeli raids on Lebanon on Monday killed at least 558 people, in the deadliest day of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, sending people fleeing for their lives.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said Tuesday that the number of displaced in Lebanon was “now probably… approaching half a million”.
ISRAEL ACCUSES THE UN OF BETRAYAL
Israel’s new UN ambassador accused the global body of pummeling his nation with unfair and disproportionate criticism since the October 7 onslaught, leaving the country feeling betrayed.
Israel has for decades accused various UN bodies of bias against it — something they deny.
“We feel that the UN has betrayed Israel,” Ambassador Daniel Meron told AFP in an interview on Tuesday as the fighting with Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah has increased fears of a wider Mideast conflict.
Meron said his country had long been striving “to find a way to work with the UN, despite our ongoing criticism”.
“We would have wanted to continue that,” he said, but now “we don’t have any trust anymore in the UN”.
Everything changed, Meron said, after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the deadly campaign in Gaza, alongside escalating strikes with Hezbollah that threaten to unleash all-out war in Lebanon.
UN-linked courts, councils, agencies, and staff have accused Israel of using disproportionate force in its retaliatory operation in Gaza, including charges of “war crimes” and “genocide”.
But Meron, who took over in July as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, maintained there had been far less condemnation of Hamas’s “barbaric” actions.
He slammed the “moral equivalence” drawn between Israel and “a terror organization”.
The UN, he said, “has betrayed Israel and at the worst time, the worst event that has happened to the State of Israel since its inception in 1948”.
He also pushed back against the condemnation from within the UN system over Israel’s escalating airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, which in a matter of days have killed hundreds, mainly civilians, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
“Where was the world for 12 months?” Meron asked, saying the Iran-back militant group and Israel have been locked in near-daily exchanges of fire since October 7, preventing 70,000 displaced people from returning to their homes in northern Israel.
“We have been restrained now for 12 months, but… life in the north of Israel has to go back to what it was,” he said.
He reiterated Israel’s claim that it is “doing everything it can to avoid” hitting civilian targets, charging though that “Hezbollah is using civilians in Lebanon as human shields”.
“They would like us to shoot back and hit civilians so that we can be blamed for killing civilians,” he said.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,495 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.