Officers from the UK Border Force are rushing to help trapped Britons flee Lebanon as Israel is preparing for a ground invasion.
It comes as Hezbollah leaders reportedly told Iran to launch the attack as revenge for the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The United States, France and several allies called for an immediate 21-day ceasefire across the Israel-Lebanon border at a United Nations meeting in New York.
A senior Biden administration official said the ceasefire would apply to the Israel-Lebanon “Blue Line,” the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel, and would allow the parties to negotiate towards a potential diplomatic resolution of the conflict.
A man reacts at the site of an Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Lebanon
Reuters
The Israeli army called up two brigades of reservists, around 4,000 soldiers, for operations on the northern border. Lt Gen Herzi Halevi said: “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has not ruled out deploying troops on the ground to evacuate Britons from Lebanon if necessary after sending 700 extra soldiers to Cyprus.
Chloe Lewin, a 24-year-old freelance journalist from London who is based in Beirut, Lebanon told the BBC: “Keir Starmer’s telling everyone to get out but we can’t…you can’t get out this week because they’re [the flights] all full and every time you get to the last page of the booking, it just crashes and it says you can’t book a flight.
“And then people I know who have had flights, they’re all getting cancelled. My friends were meant to leave this morning on Egyptair – that got cancelled, so they can’t get out.”
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Smoke billows over southern Lebanon following an Israeli strike
Reuters
People inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike that hit the Lebanese seaside town of Jiyeh
Reuters
Israeli officials told US news outlet Axios that Hezbollah’s request to Iran to attack Israel was denied because Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, is in New York for the United Nations general assembly.
In a video message that made no comment on diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire, Isareli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah was being hit harder than it could ever have imagined.
Israel has made a priority of securing its northern border and allowing the return there of some 70,000 residents displaced by near-daily exchanges of fire since war broke out in October between Israel and Hamas in Gaza on Israel’s southern border.
Lebanese hospitals have filled with the wounded since Monday, when Israeli bombing killed more than 550 people in Lebanon’s deadliest day since its civil war ended in 1990.
People stand outside a morgue at a hospital in Sidon, Lebanon
Reuters
The US administration has for nearly a year sought unsuccessfully to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
The conflict has been costly politically for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign with the violence in Lebanon increasing pressure on his administration to find a diplomatic solution.
President Biden told ABC News that all-out war was possible but not “inevitable…We’re still in play to have a settlement that can fundamentally change the whole region”.
Gen Halevi told troops: “The sense is that your military boots, your manoeuvre boots, will enter enemy territory…your entry there with force… will show (Hezbollah) what it is like to meet a professional combat force.”
Source Agencies
