Israel and Hezbollah threaten to hit harder, raising fears of all-out war

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a top Hezbollah leader vowed on Sunday to increase the intensity of their cross-border attacks, raising fears that the renewed conflict could escalate into all-out war.

The Hezbollah official, Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem, said the Lebanese militia had entered “a new stage” of open warfare against Israel, while Netanyahu said his nation would take “whatever action is necessary” to diminish the threat posed by its adversary.

The statements came after a tumultuous week of hostilities.

Early on Sunday, Hezbollah launched about 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones, according to the Israeli military, targeting what appeared to be the deepest areas it has hit in Israel since the group began firing on it in October, a day after Hamas-led forces attacked southern Israel. Since then, Israel and Hezbollah have been engaging in tit-for-tat attacks.

Israel’s military said that its air defenses had intercepted most of the projectiles fired from Lebanon. One hit Kiryat Bialik, a town of 45,000 just north of Haifa. At least four people were wounded by shrapnel in northern Israel on Sunday, according to Magen David Adom, an Israeli emergency rescue service.

Referring to the strikes, Qassem said that “what happened last night is just the beginning.”

“We will kill them and fight them from where they expect and from where they do not expect,” the militant leader told thousands of people gathered in Dahiya, the Hezbollah-dominated neighborhood in southern Beirut, for the funeral of two Hezbollah commanders killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday.

Israel fired airstrikes into southern Lebanon on Sunday that killed at least three people and wounded four others, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health. The ministry also raised the death toll from Israel’s airstrike on Friday in Beirut, reporting that at least 45 people — among them women and children — had been killed.

Rescue workers have continued to search through the rubble of two eight-story apartment buildings where Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that 10 to 15 people were still believed to be trapped. He told The New York Times that it “would be miraculous” if any of them were found alive.

Before Qassem’s comments, Netanyahu appeared to double down on his country’s decision to step up its attacks against Hezbollah. He said Israel wanted to repel Hezbollah so that tens of thousands of Israelis displaced over the past year could return to their homes in northern Israel. More than 150,000 people on both sides of the border have been driven out by the fighting.

Netanyahu’s comments came less than a week after booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants exploded across Lebanon — an attack for which Israel has not explicitly taken responsibility — killing dozens, injuring thousands and severely disrupting the group’s communications.

Netanyahu said in a recorded statement that Israel had dealt Hezbollah “a series of blows” that the group had not anticipated. “If Hezbollah didn’t understand the message,” he said, “I promise you it will understand the message.”

Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, echoed Netanyahu’s warnings. “The price Hezbollah is paying is growing, and our strikes will intensify,” he said. Halevi also said, “We will do everything possible to remove and thwart threats on the State of Israel.”

The intensifying clashes between Israel and Hezbollah prompted the United Nations’ special coordinator for Lebanon to warn that the region was “on the brink of an imminent catastrophe.” The U.N. official, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a statement that military action would not make “either side safer.”

The tensions have heightened the stakes for the U.N. as the General Assembly prepares to meet this week. World leaders, already grappling with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sudan’s civil war, are also confronting the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the war that followed in the Gaza Strip, with its catastrophic humanitarian toll for Palestinians.

The White House is watching the deadly missile strikes being volleyed across the Israel-Lebanon border with “great concern” and has told Israeli officials that “escalating this military conflict” is not “in their best interest,” John Kirby, President Joe Biden’s national security spokesperson, said Sunday.

Speaking on the ABC show “This Week,” Kirby insisted that Biden was still committed to reaching a diplomatic solution in the region — even as he conceded that the situation was worsening.

“We all, of course, recognize that the tensions are much higher now than they were even just a few days ago,” Kirby said, adding, “We want to make sure that we can continue to do everything we can to try to prevent this from becoming an all-out war there with Hezbollah across that Lebanese border.”

Asked about cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, Kirby accused the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, of not negotiating in good faith. “I would say that we are not achieving any progress here in the last week to two weeks — not for lack of trying,” he said.

Arab mediators have said that Netanyahu was also obstructing progress in the talks. He has rejected some of Hamas’ core demands, including a permanent end to the war.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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