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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that Israel would press on with its offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon, casting doubts on a US-led diplomatic push for a ceasefire to prevent a full-blown war.
Landing in New York, where he is due to address the UN General Assembly on Friday, Netanyahu said: “Our policy is clear: we’re continuing to strike Hizbollah with all [our] strength”.
“We won’t stop until we achieve all our objectives — first and foremost the return of the northern residents to their homes securely,” he said. “This is the policy. Let no one mistake it.”
The prime minister was speaking a day after US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron put forward a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire between the two sides.
US officials hope the truce would allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and also put pressure on Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel in Gaza.
But the proposal was met with a chorus of criticism in Israel, particularly from far-right members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, said the campaign should “end in one scenario: crushing Hizbollah and removing its ability to harm the residents of the North”.
Israeli forces also kept up their assault on the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant movement, saying air strikes on Beirut killed a Hizbollah commander. They also expanded the bombing campaign to the Lebanon-Syria border.
The Israeli military said the strikes on the Lebanese capital killed Muhammed Srour, whom it said had been the head of Hizbollah’s drone command, and had previously been a commander in its surface-to-air missile unit.
Residents said they had heard three blasts in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, which Hizbollah controls. Hizbollah did not immediately comment on the Israeli claims. Lebanese officials said the strike had killed two people, and injured 15.
The strikes are part of a massive escalation launched by Israel in Lebanon over the past two weeks, which has displaced 90,000 people and fuelled fears that the year-long hostilities between Israel and the Lebanese militant group are on the verge of spiralling into a broader regional conflict.
The US-French proposal, which was backed by the G7, EU, Australia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, did not set a deadline for the two sides to respond. But US officials had previously said that they expected the Israeli and Lebanese governments to do so “in the coming hours”.
People familiar with the situation said the US hoped that Netanyahu would use his speech at the UN to announce that Israel’s war in Gaza was moving into a new phase, which might persuade Hizbollah — which has insisted it will not stop firing at Israel until the war in Gaza is over — to agree a temporary truce.
But Israeli officials lined up to pour cold water on the proposal as a string of far-right members the government, on whom Netanyahu depends for political survival, railing against a ceasefire, as well as members of his Likud party.
Israel and Hizbollah has been exchanging intensifying cross-border fire since the militant group began firing rockets at Jewish state on October 8, a day after Hamas’s attack triggered the war in Gaza and a wave of regional hostilities.
But over the past week, Israel stepped up its assault against Hizbollah, assassinating a string of the group’s senior commanders. On Monday, it launched a broad bombing campaign targeting what it said were the militant group’s weapons stores in Lebanon, killing more than 600 people.
On Wednesday, the head of Israel’s army told troops to prepare for a possible ground operation in Lebanon. The military said on Thursday morning that it had conducted further strikes overnight, hitting 75 Hizbollah targets in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
Lebanon’s health ministry said 20 people were killed, 19 of them Syrian nationals, in an Israeli attack that levelled a building in the town of Younine in the Bekaa Valley. That was the deadliest strike in a day of bombings that also killed seven others elsewhere in Lebanon’s south, according to a Financial Times tabulation of health ministry statements.
Until this week Israel had rarely targeted the Bekaa Valley, a Hizbollah stronghold along Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria, previously concentrating most strikes in the south.
The IDF said it had also struck targets on Lebanon’s border with Syria relating to Hizbollah weapons transfers, while a Lebanese minister said at least one of the strikes landed on the Syrian side of a bridge connecting the two countries.
Hizbollah has also begun firing deeper into Israel. On Wednesday, it aimed a ballistic missile at Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial hub, for the first time, which was shot down by air defences. On Thursday, Hizbollah fired barrages of rockets and attack drones at various sites in northern Israel.
Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in Jerusalem
Data visualisation by Steven Bernard and Alan Smith