Israeli forces are “currently conducting” limited ground operations targeting Hezbollah inside Lebanon, the US said late on Monday, amid heavy shelling and tank fire along the border between the two countries.
“This is what they have informed us that they are currently conducting, which are limited operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the border,” state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told journalists.
Lebanese media reported shelling and tank fire targeting border villages adjacent to the areas of Metula, Misgav Am and Kfar Giladi in northern Israel, which had been declared a closed military zone earlier on Monday.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese army said it was “repositioning and regrouping forces” amid reports it had withdrawn three miles from the country’s southern border.
The reports followed fresh airstrikes in Lebanon – including on central Beirut for the first time in nearly 20 years – and came after Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, earlier told community leaders that the “next phase of the war against Hezbollah will begin soon”.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, meanwhile warned Tehran it could strike anywhere in the region at will. “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” he said in a video addressed to the Iranian people.
Gallant had earlier told troops in northern Israel: “We will use all of our capabilities – including you.” The Israeli military later declared areas of Metula, Misgav Am and Kfar Giladi in northern Israel a closed military zone.
The US president, Joe Biden, said he was aware of Israel’s plans to launch an operation into Lebanon as he urged against such a move. “I’m more aware than you might know and I’m comfortable with them stopping,” he told reporters at the White House. “We should have a ceasefire now.”
The threats from Netanyahu and Gallant came just days after an airstrike south of Beirut killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran.
On Sunday, a major Israeli raid also hit ports in Yemen run by the Houthi militia group, which is also backed by Iran, fuelling fears of a slide towards a devastating regional conflict on multiple fronts.
Though many analysts caution that senior Israeli officials have repeatedly made threats and that there are no signs of a major mobilisation by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), there is now acute international concern that a substantial Israeli force could cross the contested border into southern Lebanon and reach Hezbollah’s strongholds within days.
A US official told Reuters it had observed positioning of Israeli troops that suggests that a ground incursion into Lebanon could be imminent.
Friday’s assassination of Nasrallah – the most powerful leader in Tehran’s “axis of resistance” against Israeli and US interests in the Middle East – was one of the heaviest blows in decades to both Hezbollah and Iran.
But Netanyahu and senior military commanders in Israel appear committed to continuing what has become a region-wide effort to target longstanding enemies.
Seven top military officials and about another dozen senior commanders have been killed in the continuing Israeli air offensive in Lebanon, which IDF officials say is aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s cross-border fire that is stopping some 60,000 Israelis from returning to homes evacuated since the beginning of the war last October.
Lebanon’s health ministry said on Sunday that more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without saying how many were civilians. The government said a million people – a fifth of the population – have fled their homes.
In a three-minute video clip in English, Netanyahu accused the Islamic Republic of subjugating its citizens and directly threatened Iran’s leaders.
“There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country …. There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu said.
Addressing the Iranian people, Netanyahu said that that Iran’s “tyrants” don’t care about their future and that when Iran is finally free, everything will be different.
An airstrike early on Monday hit an apartment building in central Beirut – the first to hit in the heart of the Lebanese capital since the short war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 – and killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small, leftist Palestinian faction. Videos showed ambulances and a crowd gathered near the building on a busy, shop-lined thoroughfare in a mainly Sunni district.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas said its leader in Lebanon was killed on Monday in an Israeli strike on the country’s south. “Fatah Sharif Abu al-Amine, the leader of Hamas … in Lebanon and member of the movement’s leadership abroad” was killed in an airstrike on his “home in the al-Bass camp in south Lebanon”, a Hamas statement said.
The Beirut strike, carried out using a drone, according to a source quoted by Agence France-Presse, hit near the Kola intersection, a popular reference point in the city, where taxis and buses gather to pick up passengers.
Israel had confined its strikes on Lebanon’s capital to its southern suburbs. The airstrike threw into doubt which areas of Beirut were still safe from Israel’s expanding aerial campaign.
Paris and Washington, joined by Arab, western and European countries, called last week for Israel and Hezbollah to agree an “immediate 21-day ceasefire” and to “give diplomacy a chance”. Israel dismissed the plan.
The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, urged de-escalation during a visit to Lebanon on Monday.
“The proposal for a previous ceasefire in Lebanon is still on the table,” Barrot said from the French ambassador’s residence in Beirut on Monday afternoon, adding that “there are diplomatic solutions in Lebanon, despite the intensive Israeli strikes targeting the southern suburbs of Beirut.”
Hezbollah’s acting leader has vowed the group will fight on following the assassination by Israel on Friday of Nasrallah.
In the first speech by a Hezbollah official since Nasrallah’s death, Sheikh Naim Qassem said the group was prepared for an Israeli ground invasion and that it would continue to to fire rockets as deep as 150km (93 miles) into Israeli territory.
“What we are doing is the bare minimum … We know that the battle may be long,” he said. “We will win, as we won in the liberation of 2006,” he added, referring to the last major conflict between the two foes.
Also on Monday, the Lebanese army announced that one of its soldiers had been killed in an Israeli drone strike that targeted a motorcycle at a checkpoint.
The Pentagon says the US is sending an additional “few thousand” troops to the Middle East to bolster security and to be prepared to defend Israel if necessary.