Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, declared that his administration will stop at nothing to protect the nation.
Thousands of rocket launcher barrels belonging to the terrorist group Hezbollah were destroyed on Sunday when about 100 Israeli war aircraft attacked the organization’s southern Lebanon headquarters. According to Tel Aviv, the bombing was preemptive and intended to disrupt a planned Hezbollah onslaught in northern Israel. The organization supported by Iran said that it launched 320 drones and missiles on Israel’s 11 military outposts.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, declared that his administration will stop at nothing to protect the nation. He said, “Whoever harms us, we harm him.”
The Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza is causing instability in the Middle East, where tensions are already high. Sunday’s clashes made matters worse.
Here are 10 points on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict:
The Israeli government claims that 40 launch sites were struck by its airstrikes. “We are determined to do everything possible to defend our country, to return the residents of the north safely to their homes and to continue to uphold a simple rule: Whoever harms us – we harm him,” Netanyahu stated.
Hezbollah claimed that in retaliation for the assassination of one of its senior leaders last month, it carried out drone and missile assaults. The tensions between Hezbollah and Israel are threatening both regional peace and a full-scale conflict. It may also involve Iran, which is still recovering from some very aggressive acts by Israel against it earlier this year, such as the murder of its agents and an attack on its embassy in Syria.
The skirmish can also torpedo efforts to forge a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel has been at war with the Palestinian group Hamas for over 10 months.
Hamas and Hezbollah are Israel’s enemies. Hezbollah has said that it would stop fighting if Israel and Hamas decided to call off their hostilities.
Following the death of one of its founders, Fouad Shukur, in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut last month, Hezbollah declared that it had begun an offensive against Israeli military sites.
There were reports of air raid sirens in the northern part of Israel, and Ben-Gurion International Airport in Israel temporarily delayed takeoffs and redirected arriving planes. Flights were restarted around 7 am local time, according to Israel’s Airports Authority.
President Joe Biden was “closely monitoring events in Israel and Lebanon,” according to Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the National Security Council in the United States. He said that the nation will continue to back Israel’s right to self-defense.
Israeli officials said last week that their forces were being moved closer to the border with Lebanon. The Israeli government announced today that it was getting ready to assault a large area of southern Lebanon. It is evident that Hezbollah is getting ready to threaten people in Lebanon while launching a massive offensive on Israel. For their own protection, we advise the citizens residing in the regions where Hezbollah is active to leave the area right once,” the military declared.
Hezbollah is seen to be significantly more potent now than it was in the summer of 2006, when it battled Israel to a standstill. It is believed to have some 150,000 missiles and can strike any location within Israel, according to estimates from the US and Israel.
Close ally of Iran, which has also pledged to take revenge for the death of Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas leader, in an explosion in Tehran last month that was mostly attributed to Israel, is Hezbollah.
