Israel has struck central Beirut for the first time in a year of fighting, as it expands the offensive against its adversaries across the region.
Monday’s early hours strike in the Kola bridge area of Beirut came as two people familiar with the situation said the Israeli military had conducted limited ground incursions into Lebanon.
The strike was the first within the city limits of the Lebanese capital since Israel’s 2006 war with Hizbollah, the Iran-backed militant group. It hit an apartment building, killing three leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to the organisation, a small Palestinian faction.
Overall, Israel’s assault has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon during the past two weeks, including more than 100 on Sunday alone, up to 1mn people have been displaced, according to Lebanon.
Defence minister Yoav Gallant added that Israel would use “all the means at our disposal” against Hizbollah as he visited troops stationed on the border with Lebanon on Monday.
“The forces are ready and prepared to strike,” Gallant posted on X, while Hizbollah also vowed to continue the conflict.
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. A military spokesman said on Monday no ground operation had started.
The two people familiar with the situation said Israeli forces had carried out small-scale operations within Lebanon. One said the incursions had been limited in scale and targeted Hizbollah’s artillery positions and other infrastructure near the border.
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.
The military spokesman said the Israel Defense Forces did not comment on special operations.
Days of strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut 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.
Videos from central Beirut showed rubble strewn across a busy street as ambulances raced to the scene after Monday’s attack, which the footage indicated had targeted a specific apartment.
The Israeli military has not commented on the apparent drone strike, which damaged a single floor of the multistorey building.
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 Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut
