An Israeli airstrike killed two Lebanese soldiers and wounded three on Friday, Lebanon's military said, just hours after the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, injuring two of them for the second day in a row.
The incidents entangling both Lebanon's official army — which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah — and the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon raised alarm as Israel broadens its campaign against Hezbollah with waves of heavy airstrikes across the country and a ground invasion at the border.
In central Beirut, rescue workers combed Friday through the rubble of a collapsed building, searching for survivors of an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens in the Lebanese capital the night before.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel over the past year in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas' devastating Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 250 taken hostage.
In return, Israel’s military has pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, killing more than 2,237 Lebanese — including Hezbollah fighters, civilians and medical personnel — according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Among them, the ministry reported late Friday, were a two-year-old and 16-year-old killed by airstrikes in the southern village of Baysarieh.
Hezbollah attacks have killed 29 civilians as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, both in northern Israel since October 2023, and in southern Lebanon since Sept. 30, when Israel launched its ground invasion.
Israel strikes a Lebanese army checkpoint
On Friday, the Lebanese army said an Israeli airstrike hit a building near a military checkpoint in the southern Bint Jbeil province.
The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon when reports emerged that it had hit several Lebanese army soldiers. The Israeli army said it investigated the incident but remained “unaware of any Lebanese army facilities found in the area of the strike."
Lebanon’s army is not a party to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah — after Israel launched its ground invasion on Sept. 30, Lebanese soldiers withdrew some 5 kilometers (3 miles) from their observation posts along the border.
The only direct clash between the two national armies occurred on Oct. 3, when Israeli tank fire hit a Lebanese army post also in the area of Bint Jbeil, killing a soldier and prompting Lebanese soldiers to return fire.
Both Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers are deployed in southern Lebanon to enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended a bloody monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
But Lebanon's army is no match for Hezbollah, and neither its soldiers nor the peacekeepers have been capable of preventing the Shiite militants from entrenching themselves in the border region. Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure along the border in violation of the U.N. resolution.
Israel hits U.N. peacekeepers again, wounding two
The Israeli military opened fire near the U.N. headquarters in Lebanon’s southern town of Naqoura on Friday, the army said, hitting the observation post and injuring two peacekeepers for the second time in as many days.
An initial review by the Israeli army found that soldiers in southern Lebanon targeted what they believed to be a threat located some 50 meters (yards) from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon but ultimately struck the peacekeepers.
One of the injured peacekeepers was hospitalized in the nearby city of Tyre while the other received medical care on site, the United Nations force, known as UNIFIL, said. Both were identified as Sri Lankan.
The army repeated its warning that UNIFIL personnel abandon their positions in areas where Hezbollah militants launch rockets into Israel. Following Thursday’s attack, the U.N. peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said 300 peacekeepers in front-line positions on southern Lebanon’s border were temporarily moved to larger bases.
In a statement condemning the strike as “a grave violation of international humanitarian law," UNIFIL reported that explosions on Friday hit the same place they did the day before, when Israeli tank fire injured two Indonesian peacekeepers, damaged vehicles and a communication system, and drew sharp international criticism.
“Peacekeepers must be protected by all parties of the conflict, and what has happened is obviously condemnable,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The French foreign ministry accused Israel of deliberately firing at peacekeepers and summoned the Israeli ambassador Friday in an official protest.
In a call with his Israeli counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the importance of ensuring the safety of UNIFIL forces and urged Israel to “pivot from military operations to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible,” the Pentagon said.
When President Joe Biden was questioned by reporters whether he was asking Israel to stop striking U.N. peacekeepers, he replied, “Absolutely, positively.”
UNIFIL, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The U.N. expanded its mission following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.
Beirut residents left reeling from Israeli strikes
From the Burj Abi Haidar neighborhood of central Beirut, civil defense workers dug through concrete and twisted metal from a three-story building brought down by an Israeli airstrike the day before — the deadliest Israeli air raid to hit Beirut over the last year of war.
Thursday's airstrikes hit two residential buildings in neighborhoods that have swelled with displaced people fleeing Israeli bombardment elsewhere in Lebanon.
“The world suddenly turned upside down,” recalled Ahmad al-Khatib, a 42-year-old Lebanese postal worker who was with his wife and toddler daughter in his in-laws’ apartment when the bombs fell on the building next-door.
Al-Khatib said he had pulled his 2 ½-year-old, Ayla, out from under the debris of a collapsed bedroom wall. The force of the explosion had flung his wife, Marwa Hamdan, against a wall and a piece of metal hit her in the head. She remains in intensive care, he said, tears running down his cheeks.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV channel and Israeli media reported that the strikes aimed to kill Wafiq Safa, a top security official with the group, but he was not in either targeted building at the time of the strike. The Israeli military had no comment on the reports.
Another resident, Mohammed Tarhani, said he had moved in with his brother in Burj Abi Haidar after fleeing southern Lebanon to escape airstrikes in the past weeks.
“Where is one supposed to go now?” he asked.
Hezbollah kept up its rocket fire into Israel Friday, setting off air raid sirens just north of Tel Aviv. Interceptions by Israel's air defense system scattered rocket fragments in the seaside suburb of Herzliya and sent shrapnel flying into a building there, causing damage but no casualties.
While disrupting life for Israelis, most of Hezbollah’s barrages have not caused casualties. But early Friday, an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon killed a man from Thailand working on a farm in northern Israel.
Hezbollah's chief spokesperson vowed the group would expand its attacks into more populated areas deeper inside Israel.
“This is only the beginning,” Mohammed Afif told reporters from a smoldering street left in ruins by recent Israeli airstrikes in Beirut's southern suburbs. “I tell the enemy that you have only seen the minimum."
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18 Comments
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Mr Kipling
The Zionists have a long history of hitting UN posts and not by accident. But don't hold your breath for any consequences, Uncle Sam will mutter a few words of caution but continue to support 100% anything Israel does including genocide.
kurisupisu
When will there be a halt to the killing?
Israel just doesn’t know when to stop does it?
Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen,Iraq,Iran!
Is there any country near Israel which has not attacked or been attacked by the Israelis?
Victims: Journalists, children, medical staff, peacekeepers etc.
Israel is not interested in peace it seems….
sakurasuki
For U.N that's a buffer zone, however for other country it's new prospective settlement area.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-settler-group-advertises-new-properties-southern-lebanon
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241006-israel-settlers-publish-childrens-book-claiming-lebanon-is-ours/
TaiwanIsNotChina
It's right there in your statement: they've all attacked Israelis.
Banthu
More carnage and innocent lives lost in US-backed Netenyahu's full-scale unprovoked invasion of their neighbor.
Tamarama
Criminals dressed in Army uniforms and still criminals.
Alfie Noakes
It appears that the Trump-supporting political advisor Matthew RJ Brodsky, who recently proposed on X that "Israel carpet bomb the Irish area and then drop napalm over it” and "I hope every one of those POS Irishmen are blasted to bits" also demanded the mass rape of Irish, Spanish and Norwegian women earlier this year:
"I think the mass rape of Ireland, Spain and Norway would clarify things for them and their populace," he wrote on X.
Astonishingly, this Brodsky previously advised the Trump administration’s Middle East peace team and the White House’s Palestinian-Israeli peace team, is a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank the Gold Institute for International Strategy and was working for Dalia al-Aqidi, the Executive Director of the American Center for Counter Extremism.
The guy working for the American Center for Counter Extremism wants to murder UN Irish Peacekeepers and rape the women of three European countries.
Brodsky was also working as an advisor to the far-right Republican Dalia al-Aqidi in her bid for Congress as a representative from Minnesota. He's finally been fired and his X account is currently blocked.
This is just unreal, a former White House advisor calling for mass rape and the murder of UN peacekeepers. The US seems totally out of control.
Aly Rustom
Well said.
kurisupisu
@TaiwanisNotChina
If I were to barge into your home, throw you out onto the street and then murder you if you came back to remonstrate, would I be correct?
Yes or no?
RichardPearce
In case you believed Netanyahu's claims his regime was 'only defending itself', so far, he's effectively gone to war with the world's media, the Palestinian people, the Lebanese people, the Syrian people, the Iranian people, the Yemeni people, every humanitarian organization, the UN Secretary-General, and the UN itself.
TaiwanIsNotChina
Missiles into playgrounds are an actual provocation.
TaiwanIsNotChina
If your neighbor down the street is shooting missiles at you, would you do nothing?
John
Is it okay to murder and commit genocide on The Sabbath?
WoodyLee
Israel's finance minister once again stated the Zionists aim is to create the Greater Israel which includes all of Jordan and Lebanon, 1/2 of Syria, and Iraq, and major parts of Egypt, S. Arabia, and Turkey.
Israel never wanted Peace in the middle east, slowly but surly it is expanding it's network of spies and agents in these countries preparing them for it's long term goal of Creating The Greater Israel.
kurisupisu
@TaiwanisNotChina
.
Your apparent inability to answer a simple yes or no question says enough about your lack of logic.
Capuchin
I think this really gets to the heart of the conflict. It's the reason Israel won't end its illegal occupation of Palestine. Israel considers itself a work in progress. It's not happy with its internationally recognised borders so it practices, expansion and domination under the guise of "self defence".
In Israeli propaganda all roads lead to Iran. What does Iran have to do with Israel's occupation?
WoodyLee
"" n Israeli propaganda all roads lead to Iran. What does Iran have to do with Israel's occupation? ""
Iran with it's support to the Palestinian cause makes it the only Obstacle.
Aly Rustom
Woody, you hit the nail on the head!
THIS! Well said Capuchin.