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Israel has conducted limited ground incursions into Lebanon and carried out an air strike on central Beirut on Monday for the first time in almost two decades.
Three people familiar with the situation said Israeli forces had carried out small-scale operations across the border, as the country expands its offensive against its adversaries in the region.
One of the people said the incursions had been limited in scale and targeted the artillery positions of Hizbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, and other infrastructure near the border, as well as gathering intelligence ahead of a potentially bigger operation.
Israeli military leaders have raised the prospect in recent weeks of a ground offensive into Lebanon and mobilised at least two brigades on the northern border.
Defence minister Yoav Gallant said Israel would use “all the means at our disposal” against Hizbollah as he visited troops on the border on Monday.
“The forces are ready and prepared to strike,” Gallant posted on X, while Hizbollah also vowed to continue the conflict.
A military spokesperson said no ground operation had started and added that the Israel Defense Forces did not comment on special operations.
It is not the first time Israeli forces have carried out operations on the Lebanese side of the border since the start of the war. In April, four Israeli soldiers were injured while carrying out an operation inside Lebanese territory.
Israel’s assault has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon during the past two weeks, including more than 100 on Sunday alone, while up to 1mn people have been displaced, according to Lebanon.
In the first strike within Beirut’s city limits since Israel’s 2006 war with Hizbollah, three leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a factional group, were killed in an apartment building in the Kola bridge area early on Monday morning.
Videos from central Beirut showed rubble strewn across a busy street as ambulances raced to the scene after the attack, which the footage indicated had targeted a specific apartment.
Days of strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs have killed dozens of top Hizbollah commanders, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Israel continued to launch attacks overnight on Hizbollah targets in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon.
Hizbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said on Monday that the group would not stop its fight against Israel.
“Despite the loss of some leaders . . . we will continue to confront the Israeli enemy in support of Palestine and in defence of Lebanon,” he said in a public address, adding the group would pick a new secretary-general “as soon as possible”.
“If the Israelis want a ground incursion, the resistance forces are ready for that,” he said. “We are ready. We depend on God almighty and we will be victorious.”
The IDF on Monday added that it had killed Fateh Sherif, a leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Lebanon who it said had been responsible for co-ordinating with Hizbollah.
Hamas said Sherif had been killed in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp near the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.
Despite calls by the US and other western powers for Israel to de-escalate, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the offensive against Hizbollah and its allies will continue until more than 60,000 people displaced from Israel’s north by a year of cross-border fire are able to return home.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday his country was willing to accept a nearly 20-year-old UN resolution that demands, among other conditions, that Hizbollah pull 30km back from the border with Israel — in an intervention that seemed aimed at keeping the door open for a diplomatic solution.
Mikati said the state was doing its utmost to deal with what he called the “largest displacement in the region, in Lebanon and even in history”.
Israel has also widened its broader offensive against Iran-backed groups. Israeli fighter jets hit multiple sites in Yemen linked to the Houthi rebels on Sunday.
Netanyahu said the country was in the process of “changing the balance of power” in the Middle East and vowed to keep up its offensive on multiple fronts.
In Yemen, Israeli warplanes targeted power plants, ports and other infrastructure in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, a Houthi rebel stronghold, after the country’s military intercepted a missile launched from Yemen over central Israel on Saturday.
The Houthis have launched missiles and drones at Israel, merchant ships and US naval vessels in the Red Sea since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza.
Explosions were also heard in the Syrian capital Damascus, as a strike appeared to target the city’s outskirts, local news outlets reported.
US President Joe Biden on Sunday said he planned to speak to Netanyahu. When asked if an all-out war in the Middle East could be avoided, he replied: “It has to be.”
EU foreign ministers will hold an emergency crisis meeting via video conference on Monday afternoon, officials said, to devise a joint response to the spiralling crisis.
Sirens sounded in northern Israel as the IDF reported dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon on Monday. All were either intercepted or allowed to fall in open areas, the IDF said.
Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Charles Clover and Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut
Data visualisation by Jana Tauschinski
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