Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and Israeli forces traded hundreds of missile strikes on Sunday as their conflict along the border between the two counties threatened to erupt into an all-out war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to do “whatever it takes” to restore safety in the country’s north after Hezbollah retaliated to an Israeli attack that killed Hezbollah military leaders in Beirut on Friday and the militants blamed Israel for remotely detonating explosives in pagers and walkie-talkies inside Lebanon, killing at least 32 and injuring thousands.
Netanyahu said Israel in recent days had “dealt Hezbollah a series of blows they never imagined,” calling it a “message.” He spoke after Hezbollah launched dozens of missiles toward the Ramat David air base in northern Israel, near Haifa, early Sunday. The militant group said it was responding to the Israeli offensive this past week.
Watch related report by Linda Gradstein:
Hezbollah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem said Hezbollah had started a new phase of its fight against Israel, which he described as an "open-ended battle of reckoning." He spoke at a funeral for a top commander killed in the Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on ABC News’ “This Week” show that Israel and Hezbollah must restrain themselves to keep the conflict from escalating into an all-out war.
“We believe there are better ways … than opening a second front” along the Israeli-Lebanon border beyond Israel’s nearly year-long fight with Hamas militants in Gaza.
“Nobody is pollyannish (unrealistically optimistic) about how difficult this will be,” Kirby said, but that the warring parties should pull back from continued fighting so this doesn’t become an all-out war.
We’re watching with concern,” he said. “We’re focused on making sure this doesn’t expand.”
As the Israeli-Hezbollah warfare mounts, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees pointed to ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen, noting that the region is already very fragile.
“An expansion of the conflict may have incalculable consequences,” Filippo Grandi told VOA of the escalation in Lebanon this week.
He said the U.N., particularly its humanitarian agencies, has been making contingency plans for some time should the war spread, but that no one should expect humanitarians “to address all the countless problems, countless challenges, that will emerge from an even greater regional war.”
Meanwhile, Kirby rejected suggestions in recent U.S. news accounts that a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas is unlikely to occur before President Joe Biden leaves office on January 20 next year.
“That’s not where the president is,” Kirby told the “Fox News Sunday” show. “There is still a possibility” of a cease-fire, he said, while acknowledging to ABC, “We are not achieving any success in the last two weeks.”
Sunday’s rocket bombardment into northern Israel overnight into Sunday set off air raid sirens, sending thousands of people scrambling into shelters. The Israeli military said that rockets had been fired "toward civilian areas," pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.
One rocket struck near a residential building in Kiryat Bialik, a community near Haifa, wounding at least three people and setting buildings and cars on fire. Israel's Magen David Adom rescue service said that a total of four people were wounded by shrapnel in the barrage.
Avi Vazana raced to a shelter with his wife and 9-month-old baby before he heard the boom of the rocket hitting in Kiryat Bialik. Then he went back outside to see if anyone was hurt.
"I ran without shoes, without a shirt, only with pants. I ran to this house when everything was still on fire to try to find if there are other people," he said.
Lebanon's Health Ministry said that one person was killed and another wounded in an Israeli strike near the border.
The barrage came after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday killed at least 45 people, including one of Hezbollah's top leaders, Ibrahim Aqil, as well as women and children.
Despite calling for restraint to keep the Israeli-Hezbollah from expanding, Kirby told Fox, “The world is better off without Aqil walking around.”
The Israeli military said that it carried out a wave of strikes across southern Lebanon over the past day, hitting about 400 militant sites, including rocket launchers. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said those strikes had thwarted an even larger attack.
"Hundreds of thousands of civilians have come under fire across a lot of northern Israel. They spent the night and now the morning in bomb shelters," he said. "Today we saw fire that was deeper into Israel than before."
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire since the outbreak of the war in Gaza last October 7, when the militant group began firing rockets in solidarity with the Palestinians and its fellow Iran-backed ally Hamas. The low-level fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel, hundreds in Lebanon, and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the frontier.
Until recently, neither side was believed to be seeking an all-out war, and Hezbollah has so far stopped short of targeting Tel Aviv or major civilian infrastructure. But in recent weeks, Israel has shifted its focus from Gaza to Lebanon and vowed to bring back calm to the border so that its citizens can return to their homes. Hezbollah has said that it would only halt its attacks if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, which appears increasingly elusive.
The war in Gaza began with Hamas' shock October attack into Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage. They are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, with the Israeli military saying the death toll includes thousands of Hamas fighters.
The U.S. has designated both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
VOA’s United Nations correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report; some material came from The Associated Press.
