Defying all calls for restraint, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to sustain Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.
The Israeli army has told soldiers to prepare for a possible ground offensive to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon as the air force conducted hundreds of deadly strikes around the country.
According to an AFP report, a top military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi told a tank brigade on Wednesday, “We are attacking all day, both to prepare the ground for the possibility of your entry, but also to continue striking Hezbollah.”
This came amid escalating cross-border clashes after Israeli raids on Monday killed at least 558 people in the deadliest day of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war.
Netanyahu had shunned international calls for restraint, vowing to keep up Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.
He said, “We will continue to hit Hezbollah… the one who has a missile in his living room and a rocket in his home will not have a home,”
The health minister of Lebanon had said Wednesday’s strikes killed 51 people and injured 223, including in mountainous areas outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds.
Hezbollah said it had targeted Israel’s Mossad spy agency on Tel Aviv’s outskirts in the morning, the first time it has fired a ballistic missile in almost a year of cross-border clashes sparked by the Gaza war.
In response, Israel said it hit 60 Hezbollah intelligence sites, among hundreds of the group’s targets struck across Lebanon.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,495 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The UN has, however, described the figures as reliable.
