Israeli military deaths in Lebanon raise questions over war’s scope 

Eight Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday in Lebanon, deaths that could shape the depth and scope of an Israeli ground offensive against Hezbollah.

By Loveday Morris

, 

Miriam Berger

 and 

Shira Rubin 

October 2, 2024  

The Washington Post

A convoy of Israeli tanks heads to the Lebanon border on Tuesday, As each tank rolled by, Gershon Fried, 72,
of Safed,Israel, handed soldiers small bags of apples and honey, the traditional treat of the Rosh Hashanah holiday
that started Wednesday night. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

TEL AVIV — Eight Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon on Wednesday in the first fatalities of Israel’s ground campaign against Hezbollah, a signal of the potentially bloody toll such an offensive could take as the military widens its battle with the militant group.

The Israel Defense Forces said the soldiers were killed in three separate incidents, with seven others seriously injured, but did not give further details. The statement came just hours after the military said it was engaged in “close-range” firefights inside Lebanese territory.

If the pace of Israeli casualties continues in Lebanon, experts say, it could shape the depth and scope of the offensive, which the IDF announced early Tuesday, saying the aim was to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure near the border. For Israel, the deaths will revive difficult memories of the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, when the first tank to cross the border hit a roadside bomb and four soldiers were killed.

“What will be the depth of the invasion? How much will be cleared? We don’t know,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former major general and Israeli national security adviser. “It will be decided depending on the achievements on the ground.”

The IDF has described the ground operations in Lebanon so far as “limited, localized and targeted” raids within a few miles of the border. But the large amount of tanks and thousands of troops now amassed in the north point to planning for a much larger foray than the one Israel has telegraphed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given little away in terms of plans, other than vowing to keep striking Hezbollah with “full force” until it is possible for the more than 60,000 residents displaced along Israel’s northern border to return home. Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel last Oct. 8, a day after the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw more than 250 taken hostage.

Since then, Israel has embarked on a sweeping push against Iran-backed proxies on its borders and beyond, in an effort to restore deterrence, shift regional power dynamics and prevent further attacks.

But as Netanyahu weighs future moves, he will need to navigate domestic calls for decisive military action in Lebanon, while also addressing concerns that troops could get bogged down in skirmishes with fighters, and struggle to achieve the offensive’s bigger aims.

Far-right hawks, including in the government, have called for a more permanent “buffer zone” to be established on Lebanese territory. At the same time, the United States and other allies have tried to deter Israel from a large-scale war, amid fears of regional spillover and a worsening humanitarian crisis. In Lebanon, the Israeli military has already carried out more than 3,600 airstrikes and displaced as many as 1 million people, according to Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Limited border operations

People holding a photo of Hezbollah commander Mohammed Qassem al-Shaer attend his funeral
procession in southern Lebanon on Sept. 11. (Str/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Israeli military officials have said their key objective is to prevent Hezbollah from carrying out an Oct. 7-style attack in northern Israel, something the group has openly threatened for a decade.

It is unclear whether the group had imminent plans to launch an assault, but its fighters have spent years building military infrastructure, including attack tunnels, along Lebanon’s border with Israel.

The IDF assessed that Hezbollah had 2,000 to 3,000 elite fighters, known as the Radwan Force, operating roughly two miles from the border. An additional 6,000 to 8,000 militants were stationed six miles from the frontier, according to an Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with IDF protocol.

Israeli forces would need “a few weeks” to destroy infrastructure in the area, the official said.

Some of Hezbollah’s attack tunnels and materiel were already dismantled, according to the military, which said Tuesday that Israeli commandos had staged more than 70 raids in Lebanon in recent months, with some forces staying for several nights undetected.

But the ground forces going in now are part of “a different phase” and could do more “damage” to the group, the official said.

According to Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer in the Israeli military who has been briefed on security deliberations, the military is aware it could get stuck battling militants in southern Lebanon, “where Hezbollah are the locals, they know where their booby traps are, where they can hide.”

As the operation moves forward, she said, the military will probably pivot to fighting at night, when it has the most advantage. And unlike in Gaza, where the IDF was tasked with eliminating Hamas as both a government and military force, in Lebanon it has more clearly defined tasks and goals by which it can measure progress, Eisin said.

A deeper push

A picture taken from northern Israel along the border with southern Lebanon shows smoke billowing
above the Lebanese village of Yaron during Israeli bombardment on Wednesday.
(Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty Images)

“We’re not going to Beirut. We’re not going to the cities in southern Lebanon,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a briefing Tuesday when asked by The Washington Post about the operation’s scope.

Over the past year, Israel has been clear that it expects Hezbollah to pull back behind Lebanon’s Litani River, which is about 18 miles north of the border and lies at the northern edge of what is supposed to be a U.N.-monitored demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon. Those boundaries were drawn up in a U.N. Security Council resolution at the end of the 2006 war.

And while the military has insisted it won’t stage a full-scale invasion, it has also ordered residents of 30 villages in southern Lebanon to move even farther north. In orders posted to X on Tuesday, the Israeli military said people should move above the Awwali River, more than 30 miles from the demarcation line.

Then, on Wednesday, the IDF announced that infantry and armored units were joining the fight, indications the military is preparing for a much larger ground campaign.

“The IDF and Israeli political echelons do not want to get stuck in a protracted operation that could boost Hezbollah, after it suffered several significant blows,” said Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Le Beck, a risk consultancy. “But that’s easier said than done.”

While the military may want to focus on the “first-line” villages located within six miles of the border, Horowitz said, there is always a risk the fighting could spread. “What happens if the IDF troops get fired upon from positions north of that, for instance?”

There is historical precedent for mission creep in southern Lebanon. The first time Israel invaded, in 1978, in a bid to destroy bases set up by Palestinian militants, it initially sought to occupy six miles of territory, according to the IDF. But three days in, the military decided to advance as far as the Litani River. Troops did not leave for another 22 years.

Buffer zone

But how will Israel hold on to any gains against Hezbollah? A “buffer zone” inside the border would leave its troops vulnerable, and be a “gift” to the militant group, Horowitz said. But as time goes on, there will be more pressure inside Israel to establish one, he added.

The calls for a buffer zone are already coming from Israel’s far right.

“A renewed buffer zone, free of enemy population, is the order of the hour and it is the right and most just thing to do both from a security point of view, both from a political and moral point of view,” Israel’s far-right minister of diaspora affairs, Amichai Chikli, posted on X late last month. He attached several maps showing what he described as a “renewed border” slicing into Lebanese territory.

Last week, Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, threatened to withdraw from the government if Netanyahu agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon, repeating a threat he has made regarding negotiations with Hamas.

Eyal Zisser, a Middle East expert at Tel Aviv University, said many Israelis doubt the operation will compel Hezbollah to agree to Israel’s terms: Halt fire into northern Israel and recommit to the 2006 agreement that required them to retreat.

“We have got to this certain point, but after a few weeks of raids, then what?” Zisser said.

Israel is no stranger to occupying ground in Lebanon. In 1982, Israel launched a second invasion of Lebanon that reached the capital, Beirut, withdrawing three years later to a broader “security zone” along the border that ranged from three to 12 miles and covered about 10 percent of Lebanon’s territory.

But not everyone believes Israel needs to occupy the buffer zone to maintain it. The zone could instead be enforced by a “very strict Israeli policy” that targets anyone who enters the designated area, said Ephraim Sneh, a former Israeli defense minister and commander of Israeli forces in the “security zone” in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s.

Ideally, an effective Lebanese or international force would be deployed on the ground to keep Hezbollah from rebuilding its military capabilities, Sneh said.

Still, as long as Israel pursues military options with no political or diplomatic tracks in place, it risks getting pulled into to a longer campaign, Horowitz said.

“Eventually, whatever Israel does militarily, a diplomatic resolution will be needed if Israel wants to avoid being stuck in Lebanon,” Horowitz said.⍐

Biden works to limit conflict as Mideast edges closer to all-out war

Biden works to limit conflict as Mideast edges closer to all-out war

Israeli officials have signaled that they may not launch a massive attack on Iran, but the region remains highly combustible.

President Joe Biden in the White House earlier this week. (Tom Brenner/For the Washington Post )

By Yasmeen Abutaleb

, 

John Hudson

, 

Karen DeYoung

 and 

Michael Birnbaum

October 2, 2024 The Washington Post 

The White House is working to limit the Israeli response to the barrage of ballistic missiles that Iran fired into the country Tuesday, as some U.S. officials worry the Middle East could be edging closer to the all-out war that President Joe Biden has sought to prevent for nearly a year.

Several senior Biden officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, said Wednesday that Israeli officials have told them privately that they do not feel the need to hit back against Iran in an immediate and massive way. Yet officials in the United States and Europe fear that Israel could hit economic targets in Iran that would prompt a dangerous escalatory reaction.

Tehran has long signaled that attacks on its oil and gas industry would be a “red line,” a senior European official said. Such a strike would probably prompt retaliatory attacks from Iran on Western energy interests, potentially disrupting the global economy one month before the U.S. presidential election.

American officials say they are encouraging Israel to respond in a measured way, but U.S. allies in Europe are concerned that Washington is not putting sufficient pressure on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Our understanding is the Americans are not holding them back,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.

Biden administration officials say that while Israeli leaders have suggested they will act with restraint, that could change once Netanyahu’s decision-making has passed through the blender of Israeli politics, where far-right voices hold considerable power. Some officials say Israeli leaders’ private assurances have not always panned out over the past year.

At the same time, Israeli leaders have taken a relatively aggressive tone toward Iran publicly.

Inside Israel, there is a strong appetite for a major military response, with a sense that Iran is unusually weakened because its strongest proxy, Hezbollah, is reeling from recent Israeli attacks that damaged its communication system and decimated its leadership. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently urged Netanyahu to immediately authorize strikes on Iran’s nuclear program.

“We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime,” Bennett said on social media Tuesday. “The octopus’s tentacles are temporarily paralyzed — now comes the head.”

On Wednesday, Biden said he did not support an Israeli strike on nuclear sites in response to a question. A senior administration official said Israeli officials have not discussed such a move in private conversations with U.S. officials.

Last week, U.S. officials believed they had Israeli sign-off on a cease-fire proposal with Hezbollah, officials said at the time, only for Netanyahu to forcefully reject the proposal once the United States and other countries, including France, announced it publicly.

“What the Americans understand is the Iranians desperately don’t want escalation, and that reality means both you’re a little less concerned about escalation but you’re worried the Israelis might try to do more,” said Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. “The Israelis are on the front lines here — they’re the ones who feel the existential threat — but they also certainly do not feel bound by American pressure, and that makes Biden look bad.”

Iran fired about 180 missiles directly into Israel on Tuesday with little advance warning — only the second time the country has launched a direct attack into Israeli territory — in retaliation for Israel killing Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah last week in Beirut. That strike also killed an Iranian general, and Iran had yet to retaliate for Israel killing Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.

The Israeli military announced Monday the start of ground operations in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah militants had been launching drones and rockets into Israel since Hamas carried out a surprise attack on Israel last Oct. 7 that killed some 1,200 people.

Iran had launched missiles into Israel in April, and this time, Tehran sought to muster a more effective air assault, according to analysts, relying mostly on ballistic missiles and abandoning slower weapons such as drones and cruise missiles. That provided less advance warning for Israel’s air defenses.

Still, while the latest attack’s impact was slightly greater than in April, no deaths were reported Tuesday within Israel. One Palestinian man was reported killed in the West Bank.

The success of the United States and Israel in repelling Iranian missiles for a second time has boosted confidence inside Israel, a senior administration official said, and in private conversations Israeli officials have signaled that they will respond in a calibrated way. That is a stark change from April, the official noted, when the United States publicly and privately had to urge Israel to respond with restraint to avoid a further escalation.

A senior administration official said the United States and Israel, along with other international partners, crafted a defense plan to help defend against potential Iranian attacks that “worked as well as we could have wanted it to work.” The fact that no Israelis were killed and that the countries were able to thwart all of Iran’s missiles, including ones launched at Tel Aviv, have bought the United States some time to try to influence the Israeli response, the official said.

But the Middle East is even more combustible than it was just a few months ago. Israel in recent weeks has launched intelligence and military actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon, pounding the country with airstrikes that have killed more than 1,400 people and displaced nearly 1 million. And Israel did not inform the United States ahead of time of several major actions in Lebanon, including one that detonated pagers and handheld radios used by Hezbollah and another that killed Nasrallah.

While U.S. officials have said they are impressed by Israel’s ability to significantly degrade Hezbollah in a matter of weeks, as well as take out its command-and-control structure and kill many of its top leaders, they are still pressing Israel on what its strategic end game is since it is fighting a war on multiple fronts, including in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.

Senior Biden aides are particularly concerned that Israel’s ground incursion into Lebanon — which it has said is a limited operation to take out Hezbollah infrastructure along its northern border — could bog down into a long-term operation that drags out the war even longer.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, U.S. officials have been working to prevent the war between Israel and Hamas from spiraling into a broader regional conflagration. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and fueled an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.

U.S. officials for months have been trying to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire, but those efforts are deadlocked as neither side appears willing to make enough concessions to cement a deal. The United States is also pressing for Israel and Hezbollah to agree to a cease-fire and come to a diplomatic solution that would resolve the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border.

But Biden has been unwilling to use the most significant source of U.S. leverage — conditioning or suspending military aid to Israel — to try to change the dynamics of the war, as Israel has repeatedly rebuffed U.S. advice and counsel.

Between the United States and Israel, there are “major efforts on both sides to keep lines of communication open and make sure that perspectives are understood. There have been moments of surprise, I don’t think that’s a secret, over the course of the last couple of months,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said at a Carnegie Endowment event on Wednesday.

“As important as a response of some kind should be, there is a recognition that the region is really balancing on a knife’s edge, and real concerns about an even broader escalation or a continuing one,” Campbell said, adding that this could “imperil not just Israel but our strategic interests as well.”

Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

After missile attack, Israel may be ready to risk all-out war with Iran

For years, Israel and Iran avoided direct confrontation, as Israel secretly sabotaged Tehran’s interests and assassinated its officials without claiming responsibility, and Iran encouraged allies to attack Israel while rarely doing so itself. 

Now, the two countries seem prepared to risk a direct, prolonged and extraordinarily costly conflict.

After Israel invaded Lebanon to confront Iran’s strongest ally, Hezbollah, and Iran’s second massive missile attack on Israel in less than six months, Israel seems ready to strike Iran directly, in a much more forceful and public way than it ever has, and Iran has warned of massive retaliation if it does.

“We are in a different story right now,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former senior security official who oversaw Iran strategy on Israel’s National Security Council. “We have a consensus in Israel — among the military, the defense experts, analysts and politicians — that Israel should respond in force to Iran’s attack.”

To many Israelis, there is now little to lose: Iran’s efforts to strike the urban sprawl around Tel Aviv crossed a threshold that Tehran has never previously breached, even during its earlier missile attack in April, which targeted air bases but not civilian areas.

Critics of Israel often see the country as the primary instigator of unrest in the Middle East. But most Israelis see themselves as the victims of constant attack from Iran’s proxies — particularly Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon — and feel that they have not done enough to defend themselves. As a result, there are growing calls in Israel to make Iran fully accountable for its allies’ attacks, even if it risks an explosive reaction.

“Many in Israel see this as an opportunity to do more to inflict pain on Iran,” said Guzansky, who is now a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli research group. “To make it stop.”

Israel has yet to make a decision about exactly how to respond, six Israeli officials and a senior U.S. official said, and the extent of its reaction will be affected by the level of support — both practical and rhetorical — provided by the United States. U.S. forces helped Israel shoot down incoming missiles from both Iranian attacks.

The exact nature of its response may not become clear until after Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year holiday, which runs until sundown Friday, according to the officials, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

In talks with the Israeli government, the White House was expected to point to the relatively light damage caused by the Iranian missile attack Tuesday and urge Israeli restraint, the U.S. official said. These pleas were expected to have little impact, the official added.

But Israel’s counterattack is expected to be far more forceful than its response to Iran’s first round of ballistic missiles in April, when Israel conducted limited strikes on an Iranian air defense battery and did not officially acknowledge its involvement in that attack.

Israeli officials have told their American counterparts that they think the response in April was too little and too restrained, according to the senior U.S. official. Israeli leaders feel they were wrong to listen to the White House’s urging at the time to conduct a measured retaliatory strike, the official said.

This time, Israel might target oil production sites and military bases, the officials said. Damaging oil refineries could harm Iran’s already frail economy, as well as send global oil markets into turmoil a month before the U.S. elections.

Despite media speculation, Israel is not planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat.

Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.

Still, Israel’s response “should be seen everywhere. It should be felt by Iran. It should hurt Iran,” Guzansky urged. “In order to do that, you cannot hit a radar station again.”

Israelis were deeply shaken by the Hamas-led attack on Israel of Oct. 7 and its aftermath, an assault for them on the very idea of Israel as a haven for Jews.

Now, many have an increased tolerance for short-term danger in order to achieve long-term security, according to Sima Shine, a former senior intelligence officer who helped guide Israel’s Iran strategy. More Israelis want the government to do “things that we didn’t do in the past, because we cannot be under ongoing attacks from all sides,” Shine said.

“This is part of the miscalculation of all our enemies around,” Shine said. “They don’t understand what Oct. 7 has done to the Israeli people, to their willingness to take much more risks.”

For Israelis, Iran also now seems more vulnerable than it has for years. After Israel killed much of Hezbollah’s leadership in recent weeks and destroyed large parts of the group’s missile stockpiles, Iran can no longer count on meaningful support from its proxy in Lebanon if Israel conducts a more forceful attack on Tehran.

“Iran is much weaker than before,” Guzansky said. “Israel is freer to do more.”

The New York Times 03-10-2024 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

More than 1,900 people have been killed and over 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said about 1.2 million Lebanese had been displaced by Israeli attacks.

Israel strikes heart of Beirut, killing at least six

Reuters By Timour Azhari and Ari Rabinovitch October 3, 2024

BEIRUT/JERUSALEM, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Israel bombed Beirut early on Thursday, killing at least six people, after its forces suffered their deadliest day on the Lebanese front in a year of clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Israel said it had conducted a precise air strike on the Lebanese capital. Reuters witnesses reported hearing a massive blast, and a security source said it targeted a building in the district of Bachoura near parliament, the closest an Israeli strike has come to the central downtown district of Beirut.

Fire and smoke rise over Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, amid ongoing hostilities
between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil,
Lebanon,October 3, 2024. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

At least six people were killed and seven wounded, Lebanese health officials said. A photo circulating on Lebanese WhatsApp groups, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed a heavily damaged building with its first floor on fire.

"Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent," U.N. special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on X on Thursday.Three missiles also hit the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed last week, and loud blasts were heard, Lebanese security officials said.

Smoke rises after a strike amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces,
in Beirut’s southern suburbs and its surroundings, as seen from Hadath,
Lebanon October 3, 2024. REUTERS/Mohamed Azaki

The elimination of Nasrallah dealt a major blow to the movement and removed Iran's most powerful proxy in the Middle East.

Hezbollah and Iran's other regional allies, Yemen's Houthis and armed groups in Iraq, have launched attacks in the region in support of Hamas in its war with Israel in Gaza.

The Houthis, who have been carrying out attacks in shipping lanes in and around the Red Sea that have disrupted international trade, said on Thursday they attacked Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv with drones.

"The operation achieved its goals successfully by the arrival of the drones without being detected or shot down by the enemy," the group's military spokesperson Yahya Saree said.

Israel said it intercepted a suspicious aerial target in the area of central Israel early on Thursday.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) urged residents of Lebanese villages who have evacuated their homes not to return until further notice. "IDF raids are continuing," spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X on Thursday.

A day after Iran fired more than 180 missiles into Israel, Israel said on Wednesday eight soldiers were killed in ground combat in south Lebanon as its forces thrust into its northern neighbour.

'IRAN'S AXIS OF EVIL'

The Israeli military said regular infantry and armoured units joined ground operations in Lebanon on Wednesday as Iran's missile attack and Israel's promise of retaliation fanned concern of a wider conflict in the oil-producing Middle East.

Hezbollah said its fighters engaged Israeli forces inside Lebanon. The movement reported ground clashes for the first time since Israeli forces pushed over the border on Monday. Hezbollah said it had destroyed three Israeli Merkava tanks with rockets near the border town of Maroun El Ras.

Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets after Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a condolence video, said: "We are at the height of a difficult war against Iran's Axis of Evil, which wants to destroy us.

"This will not happen because we will stand together and with God's help, we will win together."

Iran said on Wednesday its missile volley - its biggest ever assault on Israel - was over, barring further provocation, but Israel and the United States promised to hit back hard.

However, U.S. President Joe Biden said he would not support any Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites in response to its ballistic missile attack and urged Israel to act "proportionally" against its regional arch-foe.

Biden joined a call with other leaders of the Group of Seven major powers to coordinate a response, including new sanctions against Tehran, the White House said.

G7 leaders voiced "strong concern" over the Middle East crisis but said a diplomatic solution was still viable and a region-wide conflict was in no one's interest, a statement said.

China urged the United Nations Security Council to take "urgent actions" to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East.

Western nations have drafted contingency plans to evacuate citizens from Lebanon after Tuesday's dramatic escalation, but none have launched a large-scale military evacuation yet, though some are chartering aircraft as Beirut airport stays open.

Israeli rescue force members inspect the site where a missile fired from Iran towards Israel hit a school building, in central Israel. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

1.2 MILLION LEBANESE DISPLACED

Israel's addition of infantry and armoured troops from the 36th Division, including the Golani Brigade, the 188th Armoured Brigade and 6th Infantry Brigade, suggested that the operation might expand beyond limited commando raids.

The military has said its incursion is largely aimed at destroying tunnels and other infrastructure on the border and there were no plans for a wider operation targeting Beirut to the north or major cities in the south.

A billboard with a picture of the late Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is displayed on a building in Tehran, Iran. Majid Asgaripour/WANA

Nevertheless, it issued new evacuation orders for about two dozen towns along the southern border, telling residents to head north of the Awali River, which flows east to west some 60 km (40 miles) north of the Israeli frontier.

More than 1,900 people have been killed and over 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said about 1.2 million Lebanese had been displaced by Israeli attacks.⍐