Jerusalem:
The Israeli military said it struck more than 120 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon within a 60-minute period as part of extensive strikes on Monday.
“The IAF (air force) conducted an extensive aerial operation and struck over 120 terror targets in southern Lebanon within an hour,” the military said in a statement, adding the targets belonged to the group’s elite Radwan forces and other units.
Israel on Monday battled on multiple fronts, intensifying its battle with Lebanon’s Hezbollah as Hamas warned of a long war on the first anniversary of the deadliest attack in Israeli history.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said both wars would ensure the violence his country endured last October 7 could never be repeated.
Israel’s military said air defences also intercepted a missile fired from Yemen.
Tehran, which arms and finances Hezbollah and backs the Yemeni rebels, praised Hamas’s October 7 attack as Iran awaits what Israel said will be retaliation for an Iranian missile barrage on Israel last week.
Pope Francis condemned the “shameful inability” of world powers to end the conflict in the Middle East, which European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said is “on the verge of a complete conflagration that the international community looks unable to control”.
Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said the movement “choose to keep up the fight in a long war of attrition, one that is painful and costly for the enemy”.
He also said scores of people taken hostage into Gaza last October 7 were enduring a “very difficult” situation.
Thousands of militants killed
A senior Hamas official has acknowledged that “several thousand fighters from the movement and other resistance groups died in combat”.
When the Gaza war began, Netanyahu vowed to “crush” Hamas, but troops have found themselves returning again to areas to confront signs the movement was trying to rebuild.
“We are changing the security reality in our region; for the sake of our children, for the sake of our future, to ensure that what happened on the seventh of October will not happen again. Never again,” Netanyahu said in a cabinet address.
“Never again” is a phrase associated with efforts to ensure the Holocaust and other genocides are not repeated.
Netanyahu has also vowed to bring home hostages still held in Gaza, but critics in Israel have accused him of obstructing international efforts for a truce and hostage-release deal.
Late last month Israel turned its focus north towards Hezbollah, with intensified air strikes in Lebanon and, since last week, “targeted” ground raids.
Netanyahu says the aim is to ensure tens of thousands of Israelis forced to flee Hezbollah fire can return home safely.
On Monday the military said it would expand its operations against Hezbollah to Lebanon’s coast south of the Al-Awali river, and warned people to stay away from the shore in the area.
It said Hezbollah had fired about 135 projectiles into Israel on Monday while Israeli forces hit back by striking “over 120 terror targets in southern Lebanon within an hour”.
More troops deployed
Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli soldiers in two south Lebanon border villages, including Maroun al-Ras where it has reported previous clashes, as the army said it had deployed another division for operations across the border.
Lebanon’s health ministry said bombardment killed 10 firefighters earlier.
Israel’s military said at least four projectiles were fired from Gaza just after October 7 commemorations began, and it hit back at “terrorist infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip”.
Hamas said it had fired rockets near the border with Gaza and at Tel Aviv, while Hezbollah twice said it had fired rockets at areas north of Haifa, a major coastal city.
As troops fought what Israel says is a war for its very existence, vigils at massacre sites and rallies called for the return of hostages a year after their abduction.
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Families of the dead wept in Reim, a kibbutz community where Hamas fighters killed at least 370 people at the site of the Nova music festival, that day’s deadliest attack.
President Isaac Herzog led a moment’s silence there at 6:29 am – the time the attack began.
Mourners also gathered in Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv amid the sound of war as Hamas fired a rocket barrage.
“It still feels surreal, like a nightmare that we are still supposed to wake up from eventually,” said resident Ariel Tamir.
In Jerusalem, Shir Siegel said the wait for her hostage father’s return from captivity has been agonising.
“A year has passed but actually one long day has passed that feels like an eternity,” she said.
Early on October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack began with thousands of rockets fired at Israeli border communities.
At the same time militants stormed across Gaza’s fortified border and attacked nearly 50 different sites, including kibbutzim communities and army bases as well as the music festival.
Militants went door-to-door shooting residents dead.
Gaza’s ‘graveyard’
Hours later, Israel launched a military offensive that has reduced swathes of Gaza to rubble, and displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million residents at least once amid an unrelenting humanitarian crisis.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on X Monday the war had turned Gaza into a “graveyard”.
Militants took 251 people hostage into Gaza, where 97 are still being held, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
An Israeli campaign group on Monday announced the death of Gaza hostage Idan Shtivi, 28, who was abducted at the music festival.
Since Israel’s escalation in Lebanon began in late September, more than 1,110 people have been killed and more than one million are displaced, official figures show.
According to Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry, 41,909 people, the majority civilians, have been killed there since the start of the war. The figures have been deemed reliable by the United Nations.
Israel’s military says 349 soldiers have been killed since the Gaza ground offensive began on October 27.
People in Gaza just want the war to end.
“It feels like the world stopped on October 7,” said one displaced woman, Israa Abu Matar, 26.
“I have grown old while watching my children hungry, scared, having nightmares and screaming day and night from the sound of the bombing and shells.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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