ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed his country’s military to further expand invasions of southern Lebanon, as regional tensions spike amid the United States-Israeli war on Iran.
“I have just instructed to further expand the existing security buffer zone. We are determined to fundamentally change the situation in the north [of Israel],” Netanyahu said in a video statement from the Northern Command on Sunday, pushing forward his country’s stated bid to replicate the “Gaza model” of occupation.
Netanyahu’s announcement came as Israeli forces advanced in multiple areas of southern Lebanon in a concerted push towards the Litani River in a bid to drive out Hezbollah, which entered the broader Iran war in early March with retaliatory attacks on Israel after the killing of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Reporting from Tyre in southern Lebanon, Al Jazeera’s Obaida Hitto said that fighting between Hezbollah and Israel had “intensified” over recent hours. He said Israeli troops had reached a tributary of the Litani River south of the town of Qantara, on the eastern front near al-Muhaysibat.
Hitto described the development as a “big strategic change”.
“This tributary that they’ve reached south of Qantara is just a few kilometres, and in some places, just a few hundred metres away from the actual Litani River,” he said. “So this is going to turn into a big fight, based on what we’re hearing from Hezbollah.”
At least 1,238 people have been killed since Lebanon was dragged into the war on March 2, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
The toll includes 124 children, while more than 3,500 people have been wounded, the ministry said in a statement. On Saturday and Sunday alone, 49 people were killed, it said, including 10 rescue workers and three journalists.
Reporting from Beirut, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said there was “no let-up in Israeli strikes”.
The United Nations says that more than 1.2 million people have been displaced.
Hundreds of mourners gathered Sunday in Choueifat, south of Beirut, for the funerals of three journalists killed by an Israeli air strike while covering the war, an attack denounced by Lebanon as a “blatant crime”.
Saturday’s attack on the journalists’ vehicle in the town of Jezzine killed Ali Shoeib, a veteran correspondent for Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Fatiman Ftouni of the pro-Hezbollah Al Mayadeen channel and her brother, cameraman Mohammad Ftouni.
Israel’s military said in a statement that it had killed Shoeib in a targeted strike. Labelling him a “terrorist”, it claimed without evidence that he was a Hezbollah intelligence operative and accused him of reporting on locations of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.
The military did not comment on the killing of Ftouni and her brother.
Under intermittent rain, the three were buried in a temporary graveyard – a common practice in times of war for those who can’t be buried in their hometowns.
“Fatima and Ali were heroes,” a relative of Ftouni’s who gave only his first name as Qassem told news agency AFP.
Al Jazeera’s Hitto said there was a mood of “grief, but also defiance” in southern Lebanon. “As people mourn these journalists, the message from members of the media is clear: they will not be intimidated; they will report nonstop,” he said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told public broadcaster France 3 on Sunday that journalists working in war zones “must never be targeted”, including when they “have links with parties to the conflict”.
“If it is indeed confirmed that the journalists in question were deliberately targeted by the Israeli army, then this is extremely serious and a blatant violation of international law,” Barrot said.