Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has said that his group would assess the impact of its rocket and drone attack on Israeli military targets this morning before determining whether it would carry out further attacks to avenge a slain commander.
The leader of the Iran-backed armed group said in a televised address that the group had been able to carry out its attack "as planned," denying statements by the Israeli military that its "pre-emptive" strikes had stopped a wider attack.
This morning's exchange of strikes between Israel and Hezbollah appears to be a significant escalation.
The Israeli military says around 100 fighter jets carried out what it described as pre-emptive strikes on Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon on Sunday morning. Hezbollah later fired rockets and missiles into northern Israel.
If that 100 figure is correct, it would be the largest Israeli attack on Lebanon since the full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
Israel's strikes happened at around 04:30 local time (01:30 GMT), and it said that Hezbollah was planning a large-scale attack half an hour later, at 05:00 local time.
According to reporting by the New York Times, quoting an anonymous Israeli intelligence official, this included rocket strikes on Tel Aviv, the country’s biggest city, deep inside central Israel.
In the end Hezbollah said it had fired more than 300 rockets and missiles targeting military facilities in northern Israel, where air raid sirens have been sounding.
GR
FR
DE
ES
IT
RU
EU
Hezbollah’s strike on Israel in retaliation for to the killing of the movement’s armed wing Fuad Skukr has been postponed due to several reasons, with the Gaza ceasefire talks being one of them, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said.
ReplyDelete"The movement was ready to retaliate immediately after Fuad Shukr’s killing, but we understood that Israel and its ally, the United States, were getting prepared for our response back then and any haste in such circumstances would mean a defeat. Apart from that, we wanted to give the Gaza talks a chance," the Al Manar television channel quoted him as saying.