Hezbollah attempts to make Lebanon ground invasion ‘costly’ for Israeli army as it continues its advance.
The Israeli military has said four soldiers were killed in combat in southern Lebanon, where its forces are clashing with Hezbollah fighters after launching a ground invasion of the country.
An army statement on Tuesday named three soldiers from the same battalion who “fell during combat”. In a separate statement, it said another soldier had been killed in the same incident and two others wounded, without naming them.
On Tuesday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that Israeli drone attacks killed four people in southern Lebanon: a strike on a car in the al-Wasita Al-Qasimiya area near Tyre killed two, while another raid on Derikifa killed two more people.
This comes a day after the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said two peacekeepers were killed “when an explosion of unknown origin destroyed their vehicle” near the southern Lebanese village of Bani Haiyyan. Another peacekeeper was killed by a projectile on Sunday near the southern Lebanese village of Aadchit el-Qsair.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday ordered the military to expand its invasion in southern Lebanon, pushing deeper to extend what he calls a “buffer zone” reaching the Litani River.
Israel’s far-right ministers have urged Netanyahu to annex southern Lebanon, as the military destroys bridges and homes to cut the area off from the rest of the country.
Plan to ‘change Israel’s borders’
Al Jazeera’s Lebanon correspondent Zeina Khodr said Monday night marked a new escalation as Israel opened a new front in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, targeting roads that link towns known to be Hezbollah strongholds and strategic supply lines for the group.
“In the past weeks, [the Israeli army] hit bridges over the Litani, now they are trying to isolate the west Bekaa from southern Lebanon,” Khodr said, reporting from Beirut.
“Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem made it very clear they know the imbalance of power. They are not going to be able to stop this invasion, and the Israeli army will most likely reach until the Litani River, but they will not make it easy for them to consolidate control,” she continued.
“What Hezbollah is trying to do is make this a costly war for Israel.”
The escalation in Lebanon comes amid the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, which has killed more than 1,340 people since February 28.
The Israel Hayom newspaper on Monday reported that Netanyahu told senior US officials that any future agreement between the US and Tehran would not stop Israel’s war in Lebanon.
On Tuesday, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel’s military would occupy a swathe of southern Lebanon even after the end of the current war against Hezbollah.
“At the end of the operation, the IDF will establish itself in a security zone inside Lebanon, on a defensive line against anti-tank missiles, and will maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani,” Katz said in a video statement published by his ministry.
He added that hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese residents would be “completely prevented” from returning until north Israel’s security was ensured, adding that: “All the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza.”
Israel’s far-right Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich last week said in an Israeli radio interview that the war in Lebanon “needs to end with a different reality entirely”, which includes a “change of Israel’s borders”.