Hezbollah hits back after Israeli attacks

BEIRUT/SANAA — The Israeli military pounded Beirut's southern suburbs with airstrikes on Tuesday, mounting one of its heaviest daytime attacks yet on the Hezbollah-controlled area, and struck the middle of the country, where more than 20 people were killed.

Smoke billowed over Beirut as about a dozen strikes hit the southern suburbs starting in midmorning. After posting warnings to civilians on social media, the Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah targets in Beirut's Dahiyeh area and later claimed it dismantled most of the group's weapons and missile facilities.

Israel said it had taken steps to reduce harm to civilians and repeated its standing accusation that Hezbollah deliberately embeds itself into civilian areas to use residents as human shields, a charge Hezbollah rejects.

In northern Israel, two people were killed in the city of Nahariya when a residential building was struck, Israeli police said. Hezbollah later claimed responsibility for a drone attack that it said was aimed at a military base east of Nahariya.

In Mount Lebanon Province, in the middle of Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed eight people in the village of Baalchmay, southeast of Beirut, and 15 people in Joun village in the Chouf district, Lebanon's Health Ministry said.

In the south, five people were killed in an Israeli strike on Tefahta, two in a raid on Nabatieh and one in the coastal city of Tyre. Another person was killed in a strike in Hermel in the northeast, the ministry said.

Ignited by the Palestine-Israel conflict in Gaza, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah had been rumbling on for nearly a year before Israel went on the offensive in September, pounding Lebanon with airstrikes and sending troops into the south.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli military strikes killed at least 14 Palestinians across the enclave on Wednesday, as its forces deepened their incursion into Beit Hanoun town in the north, forcing most remaining residents to leave.

Late on Monday, an Israeli strike hit a makeshift cafeteria used by displaced people in Muwasi, the center of an Israeli-declared "humanitarian zone".

At least 11 people were killed, including two children, according to officials at Nasser Hospital, where the casualties were taken.

The latest bombardment came as the United States said it would not reduce its military support for Israel after a deadline passed for allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

On Tuesday, Palestinian militant group Hamas condemned the US for complicity in the "war of genocide" in the Gaza Strip after Washington said Israel was not violating US law on the level of aid entering the territory.

Hamas condemned Washington's "claims" that Israel is "taking measures to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza" and said it was a "confirmation of the full partnership of President (Joe) Biden's administration in the brutal war of genocide against our people".

Joyce Msuya, interim chief of the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA, on Tuesday condemned "daily cruelty "in Gaza.

She described civilians driven from their homes and "forced to witness their family members killed, burned and buried alive" in Gaza, which she called "a wasteland of rubble".

"The daily cruelty we see in Gaza seems to have no limits," Msuya told the United Nations Security Council. "As I brief you, Israeli authorities are blocking humanitarian assistance from entering North Gaza, where fighting continues, and around 75,000 people remain with dwindling water and food supplies."

Ahmed Bayram, a media adviser for the Middle East at the Norwegian Refugee Council, told China Daily that the evidence on the ground "is hard to dispute".

Famine catastrophe

"Northern Gaza is closer than ever to a famine catastrophe," Bayram said, adding Israel "has imposed a strict blockade on the north, leaving close to 100,000 people fighting for their very survival".

"Civilians are besieged, starved and continue to be killed," he said. "Israel must stop weaponizing aid."

Elsewhere in Yemen, the Houthi group said they launched rocket and drone attacks on Tuesday targeting US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea and two US destroyers in the Red Sea.

The attacks were carried out "in response to the British-American aggression on our country (Yemen), and in support to the Palestinian and Lebanese people", Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said.

However, Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder said the Abraham Lincoln "was not attacked, contrary to some of the allegations ... by the Houthis".

Also on Tuesday, at least 10 Houthi operatives were killed in two separate US drone strikes in Yemen's central Al-Bayda Province, a Yemeni government military source told Xinhua news Agency.

The strikes targeted mobile rocket launchers in the As-Sawma'ah and Dhi-Na'im districts, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Jan Yumul in Hong Kong contributed to this story.

Agencies - Xinhua