‘You should leave’: Tensions high as Lebanon faces frightening prospect of possible ground assault
The Israeli airstrikes have left people in the south of Lebanon feeling there are no safe places around here now.
Dozens more were killed in another intense day of Israeli bombing including more children – with whole families missing and unaccounted for.
Follow latest: Israel preparing ‘for possible ground invasion’
One Lebanese army general told us: “This area is not safe now. You should leave. We are evacuating everyone from here.”
He was with a group of soldiers in an army Humvee and said his men had recently evacuated residents from the Christian town of Aalma El Chaeb further south near the border.
This was an area we had visited previously with UN peacekeepers and where the residents insisted Hezbollah remained outside the town.
It was notable for being remarkably unaffected despite the devastation evident in all the surrounding villages hugging the border.
The situation is now considered too risky even for those residents who’d very publicly and successfully rejected any Hezbollah involvement or interaction.
As we drove around the south, we saw craters on the side of the main coastal highway linking the area to the capital Beirut.
A crater on the side of a road after an Israeli airstrike
Destruction from an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of Tyre
There were two upturned cars which had ended up on the other side of the road. On one street, rows of shops and businesses appeared to have been blasted.
There were what looked like a woman’s individual ID photographs scattered on the ground, along with clothing and a baby’s bib. A small fish tank in one of the shops still had its inhabitants swimming around – but very little else looked intact.
A residential apartment on the outskirts of Tyre appeared to have been freshly hit when we turned up, with smoke wafting out from the rubble and a fire still burning inside.
A woman’s photo was among the items on the ground
Buildings destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of Tyre
A fire truck pulled up while we were there and moments later, we were hastily moved on by Hezbollah supporters who appeared on motorbikes.
“Leave the area,” one said, saying it was unsafe because of escaping gas. We spotted two lone women dragging suitcases behind them as they made their way along the road out of the area.
Many of the schools and universities have been turned into temporary shelters and we were at the Sidon Faculty of Law as several truck-loads of provisions were ferried into a crowd of anxious and angry displaced people.
Edouard Beigbeder from UNICEF told us: “They are traumatised. They’ve lost their houses. They’ve seen their houses being burnt.
“They’ve lost their income. They’ve lost many things.”
Edouard Beigbeder from UNICEF speaks to Sky News
Hector Hajjar, the Lebanese minister of social affairs who was visiting the shelter, brushed aside our attempt to ask him about the situation and his armed bodyguard tried to block the path of one fraught woman who heckled him as he walked away.
“If you’re going to come here, at least listen to us,” she plaintively shouted after him. The minister turned briefly to talk to her but whatever he said failed to pacify her.
“They’re not listening to us,” she told us. “Everyone’s just looking after themselves… we don’t have mattresses, covers or pillows… and our children are sleeping on the ground.”
Several truck-loads of provisions were brought in
Our presence at the shelter seems to rile many of those displaced. It’s not clear whether it’s because we are clearly Western, because we are media, or because they are simply just very highly stressed. Maybe all three. Tensions are high and tempers frayed.
One young mother holding a toddler on her hip told us she’d fled the bombing further south with her five children and moved north to Sidon just hours earlier.
“There’s a lot of destruction,” she said of the home she’d just left. “People died, houses got destroyed, the roads were blocked.”
She added: “There’s no more bread, no more food, no more water.”
A displaced man speaking after Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon
A young man standing next to her called Yousuf told us it wasn’t just Hezbollah fighters or supporters being targeted.
“They’re not differentiating between fighters and civilians… this aggression is intensely hitting civilian areas – they’re not differentiating at all,” he said.
As another day of Israeli bombing slipped into night, we could hear from our accommodation the regular booms of missiles hitting targets.
Read more from Sky News:
British mum ‘torn’ about leaving husband in Lebanon
‘We’re already at war’, Lebanese minister says
Alerting Hezbollah to invasion would be strange tactic – analysis
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Hezbollah says it will not back down and it claimed it had fired a ballistic missile for the first time at intelligence headquarters near Tel Aviv. The missile was intercepted.
We’ve heard a few Hezbollah rockets being fired over the past few days but there seems to be a marked drop in their salvoes around where we are, anyway.
The Israeli forces and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have insisted they are pressing on and the army chief has said these strikes are preparations for a possible ground assault.
Rhetoric or not, that’s a frightening prospect for the Lebanese people caught up in the thick of this bombardment.
Alex Crawford is reporting with cameraman Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham and Lebanon producers Jihad Jineid and Sami Zein
World
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s UN speech had passion and props – but no clear plan to end war
Benjamin Netanyahu loves the platform of the United Nations but the UN doesn’t love him.
As he entered, hundreds of diplomats left. He delivered his speech to a chamber more than half empty.
Mr Netanyahu claimed he was not initially going to attend, but was compelled to by the “lies and slanders” he heard from other leaders.
He used the moment to remind the world of 7 October and the ongoing fate of hostages being held inside Gaza.
He justified Israel’s war, claiming without evidence that it is the most moral campaign in history. Israel critics, of which there are many, accuse the country of genocide.
Israel-Hezbollah latest: Follow live updates here
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
Netanyahu slams Israel’s critics in UN speech
He pointed the finger at the “goons” in Iran as he has done year after year and described the Iranian axis across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as a curse.
He lambasted the International Criminal Court for seeking arrest warrants against him and defence minister Yoav Gallant.
He invoked biblical references to advocate modern-day peace but insisted his country must keep fighting multiple wars; there was not even a passing glance to the US-French proposal for a truce in Lebanon.
Mr Netanyahu again dedicated time to speak about the prospect of normalisation with Saudi Arabia, something he is desperate for, but the Kingdom’s Crown Prince isn’t.
Riyadh won’t make peace with Israel without a path to an independent Palestinian state, and that is something Mr Netanyahu isn’t willing to give.
Mr Netanyahu does these moments well. He is a master of the media and revels in the moment.
In the end though, we heard nothing new.
It was passionate and it was angry. It had maps as props and a crowd flown in to cheer along.
Read more:
Sir Keir Starmer: ‘Escalation serves no one’
Did Israel sabotage chance of ending conflict?
British PM fails to meet Benjamin Netanyahu
But there was no explanation for how the war in Gaza will end, no plan for the ‘day after’ and no idea for “deradicalisation”.
He said Israel must “defeat” Hezbollah but gave no hint of a timeline and no clue what might come next.
It was a speech that will go down well with many here in Israel, their leader defending their country on the world stage.
But Israelis are weary after 12 months of war and many will come away wondering how many more months of conflict lie ahead.
After a week of airstrikes in the neighbourhood of Dahieh, the shock of an explosion is rarely followed by surprise.
When we arrived in this densely populated part of southern Beirut, the street was filled with glass and rubble and weary-looking faces. This is the fourth time in a week that this area has been hit.
Behind a cordon, we could see a damaged apartment block just down the street. Below, a popular juice shop called “Tasty Bees” had survived unscathed.
Israel-Hezbollah latest: Follow live updates here
A detachment of Lebanese troops stood guard at the scene, but we knew they were not in charge in this part of the city.
Dahieh is run by the political and military group Hezbollah and we were invited by their security personnel to take a closer look at the site.
Israel said its airstrike targeted a Hezbollah commander. Pic: AP
The fourth floor was badly damaged by a series of precision-guided missiles.
The outer walls of various apartments had been removed, revealing mattresses, curtains and colourful chandeliers.
The Israeli military claims to have killed a Hezbollah commander called Mohammed Surur in the strike.
The country’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said that he had authorised it and described Surur as the leader of the Iran-backed group’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone division.
Surur’s death has not been confirmed by Hezbollah – but it certainly has not intimidated some of the group’s supporters.
“I’d die for Hezbollah,” shouted one man and he brushed the rubble off the top of his battered-looking car.
👉 Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts 👈
Our tour came as the international community launched an urgent attempt for a temporary truce in a conflict that has killed more than 1,500 this year. But prospects for a ceasefire were quickly blown away by the blast.
At least two have died, with 15 injured in this attack.
Israeli airstrikes have hit several areas of southern Lebanon including Saksakiyeh. Pic: Reuters
Read more from Sky News:
Starmer: ‘Escalation serves no one’
Did Israel sabotage the chance of a ceasefire in Lebanon?
Israeli army prepares for war
The mayor of the local suburb Atef Mansour gave voice to the feeling shared by many here.
“What happened is an ongoing crime committed by the Israeli enemy, and we witness this scene every day, day after day in a densely populated neighbourhood.”
Yet Hezbollah has continued its military operations, sending 45 rockets into northern Israel. Such attacks invite an inevitable response.
As far as our minders in Dahieh were concerned, the purpose of our visit was clear – to communicate the impact on civilians of such strikes.
Yet we all know the next assault will come soon.
World
Airstrike on Lebanon kills six children as three families devastated – with nothing left of home they were sheltering in
There seemed little sign of any let-up in the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon with a spray of early morning strikes in the south. There were others in the eastern Bekaa Valley and northeast of the capital, Beirut.
While we were in the hills of Mount Lebanon region in the southwest of the country, there were regular airstrikes landing south of us. Israeli drones circled above and we heard sonic booms as Israeli jets broke the sound barrier.
“These are tactics to terrorise us,” one resident in the village of Joun told us.
Weeping women and Al Risala scouts gathered with crowds of other Joun villagers for the funeral of a six-year-old boy, his mother and his father.
The family was one of three inside a home high above the village when the Israeli bomb hit.
There’s nothing left of the home now.
Follow latest:
Netanyahu says military will keep fighting with ‘full force’
The coffin of a young boy is carried
The father, Khodor Raad, is well-known locally. He ran a taxi service and worked as a welder but was also involved in Hezbollah’s social welfare programmes, according to the village’s residents.
“He was not a fighter,” one Hezbollah representative told us. “The area where he lived would not allow weapons there, for sure.”
The villagers we spoke to told us Khodor’s family had taken in two other families who had been displaced by the recent Israeli bombardment.
One family of three children and their mother was from Syria while the second family, a mother and her two children, had fled the onslaught in the south just a day earlier.
Khodor was the senior adult male in the house. The other males were his young son, Hassan, and two elder brothers, one a teenager.
The airstrike just after 10.30am on Wednesday wiped out the bulk of three families, killing six children, three mothers and the patriarch Khodor.
Hassan’s brothers somehow escaped. The elder of the two, 21-year-old Ahmad, had to be pulled out of the rubble with head wounds and a lacerated hand. Yousuf, 15, seems to have escaped unscathed.
This is the first time Mount Lebanon Governorate has been hit in nearly a year of increasingly deadly exchanges between Israel and Lebanon. During this time (according to the non-profit organisation ACLED) Israel has fired nearly five times as many missiles into Lebanon as Hezbollah has launched into Israel.
But the exchanges until a week ago were mainly confined to the border region, although they’d caused a serious amount of displacement in both Israel and Lebanon. About 60,000 Israelis have fled their homes and 120,000 families have had to abandon their houses on the Lebanese side.
This week though, the massive spike in Israeli airstrikes – more than a thousand in a single day on Monday – plus the Israeli authorities’ warnings to evacuate – prompted another huge wave of people to up and move to try to escape the bombings.
The Lebanese government has estimated the displacement is likely to reach half a million with a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis.
The funerals in Joun have stunned the small community who have opened their homes to thousands of displaced people.
“Please treat our displaced brothers and sisters with courtesy and kindness,” the village representative told the funeral crowds.
Read more:
Washington says a Lebanon ceasefire is ‘close’
British mum trying to flee Lebanon with her children
The body of the young boy Hassan at the funeral
Six-year-old Hassan’s school friends and fellow scouts were among the funeral mourners and his scout leader, who was one of the pallbearers, openly sobbed.
“We are civilians,” said a family relative called Mostafa Issa – despite the presence of young soldiers clad in military-style camouflage outfits.
At the head of the pallbearers was Hassan’s elder brother, Ahmad, also in uniform – a fact which officials attempted to explain away by saying “he’d just put on the uniform for the funeral”.
“The Israelis are claiming they are targeting Hezbollah weapons,” Mostafa Issa told us. “But this family took in two other displaced families! Why would they have weapons? They are civilians and the Israelis are hitting civilians.”
He went on: “These crimes should stop wherever they are being carried out – in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria.”
The crushed family home is a pile of rubble now. Vehicles parked around it, including their neighbours’, are mangled.
School books can be seen half buried in the broken stones, as well as a child’s pair of trousers.
Hussein told Sky News: ‘We are all willing to die’
“We are prepared to die,” said one young man called Hussein. “We are not the terrorists! It is the one who is bombing us and our homes who is the terrorist. We are all prepared to die for humanity.”
He went on, his face quivering with emotion: “40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. And yet it is us who are called the terrorists.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Hezbollah is a proscribed terror outfit in Israel, the USA and the UK, among other nations. And it has a fierce control over parts of the country, particularly the south.
It has a powerful weapons cache, including long-range missiles, has tens of thousands of fighters and enjoys financial and intelligence support from Iran.
But the militant group also has a political wing with MPs in parliament and an active social welfare programme running schools, hospitals and aid groups which further cements its grip on parts of the population.
Additional reporting by: camera Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham, and Lebanon producers Jihad Jineid, Sami Zein and Hwaida Saad
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports6 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports11 months agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Environment1 year agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway