Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Sunday while continuing to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the Lebanese health ministry said 105 people had been killed and another 359 injured. The fresh assaults on Iran-backed proxies across the Middle East risk accelerating a slide towards a devastating regional conflict on multiple fronts.
The attack on the port of Hodeidah in Yemen involved dozens of Israeli planes and appears to have targeted fuel facilities, power plants and docks at the Ras Issa and Hodeidah ports. It one of the biggest such operations yet seen in the near year-long crisis in the region. Houthi media reports said the strikes had killed four people and wounded 33. Residents said the strikes caused power cuts in most parts of Hodeidah. Israeli military officials said the raid targeted the Houthis, an armed Iranian-backed group that controls most of Yemen. They have fired at Israeli targets for months in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. They have also targeted international shipping in the Red Sea. On Saturday, they launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel’s main international airport when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was arriving.
The strikes in Yemen and the new wave of attacks in Lebanon came 48 hours after the Israeli operation that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut.
Since Nasrallah’s death, Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran, has said it will continue fighting Israel.
A series of salvos were launched from Lebanon on Sunday, including one that Hezbollah said targeted a group of Israeli soldiers. Others targeted built-up areas in northern Israel, according to officials in Israel.
Nasrallah’s assassination dealt a major blow to Hezbollah and to Iran, removing an influential ally who helped build the Shia Muslim militant organisation into the linchpin of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance”, the loose network of anti-Israeli, pro-Iranian armed groups across the Middle East which includes the Houthis and Hamas. The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency on Sunday as saying that Israel should not be allowed to attack Iran-aligned groups one after the other.
The sites targeted in Yemen on Sunday were used by the Houthis – who seized the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, in 2014 – to “transfer Iranian weaponry to the region and supplies for military needs”, the Israeli military said in a statement.
“Over the past year, the Houthis have been operating under the direction and funding of Iran, and in cooperation with Iraqi militias in order to attack the state of Israel, undermine regional stability and disrupt global freedom of navigation,” it said.
A statement issued by the office of the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, after he monitored the strikes from an air force command centre, said: “Our message is clear. For us, no place is too far.”
More than 1,600 people have been killed and 8,000 wounded in Lebanon since Israel stepped up its bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds last Monday, according to health ministry figures.
The Lebanese health ministry said preliminary tolls showed 24 killed and 29 wounded in an Israeli strike near the main southern city of Sidon on Sunday. It later reported that Israeli air raids on the Baalbek-Hemel area of eastern Lebanon “killed 21 people and wounded 47”.
Four more died in a raid targeting Joub Jenin in the Bekaa area, the ministry said.
Israel’s military said the air force had struck dozens of targets including launchers and weapons stores, while its navy said it had intercepted eight projectiles coming from the direction of Lebanon.
The strikes were concentrated in the south of Lebanon, where tit-for-tat exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah have been going on for almost a year.
Drones could be heard flying over all parts of the Lebanese capital overnight and throughout the day on Sunday.
Nasrallah’s death capped a devastating fortnight for Hezbollah, starting with the detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members. The attack, blamed on the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, killed 42 people and injured several thousand, mostly Hezbollah members.
Israeli airstrikes across Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa valley near the Syrian border and Beirut’s southern suburbs have killed a string of the group’s other most senior commanders.
The Israeli military said on Sunday it had killed Nabil Kaouk, the deputy chairman of Hezbollah’s executive council, in a strike on Saturday. Hezbollah confirmed his death, bringing the number of senior Hezbollah leaders who have died in Israeli strikes in the last 10 days to seven. They include at least three founding members who had evaded death or detention for decades.
Hezbollah denied on Sunday Israel’s claim to have assassinated Abu Ali Rida – a key Hezbollah commander in south Lebanon and the last remaining senior military leader left alive – in an airstrike.
In Beirut, displaced families spent the night on benches at Zaitunay Bay, a string of restaurants and cafes on Beirut’s waterfront where private security usually shoos loiterers away.
The UN’s high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said “well over 200,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon” and more than 50,000 had fled to neighbouring Syria.
Reports in the Israeli media suggested that the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was continuing to push for a limited ground offensive within weeks, seeing a closing window of opportunity.
Netanyahu said on Saturday that Nasrallah’s killing was a necessary step toward “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come”. “Nasrallah was not a terrorist, he was the terrorist,” he said, warning of challenging days ahead.
An international diplomatic push for a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel has made little progress, though Lebanon’s information minister, Ziad Makary, said during a cabinet meeting on Sunday that efforts were still under way.
The White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, said on Sunday that Israel would not be able to safely get people back into their homes in the north of the country by waging an all-out war with Hezbollah or Iran.
Israel’s stated goal for its campaign in Lebanon is to make its northern areas safe from Hezbollah rocket fire and allow more than 60,000 displaced people to return.
“An all-out war with Hezbollah, certainly with Iran, is not the way to do that. If you want to get those folks back home safely and sustainably, we believe that a diplomatic path is the right course,” Kirby told CNN.
European foreign ministers also stepped up their calls for a ceasefire. Israel must “immediately stop its strikes in Lebanon”, the French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said, adding that his country was opposed to any form of ground operation.
The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said he had spoken to the Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, and that “we agreed on the need for an immediate ceasefire to bring an end to the bloodshed”.
Nasrallah’s body was recovered intact from the site of Friday’s strike, a medical source and a security source told Reuters on Sunday. Hezbollah has not yet said when his funeral will be held.
Supporters of the group and other Lebanese people who hailed its role in fighting Israel, which occupied south Lebanon for years, mourned him on Sunday.
“We lost the leader who gave us all the strength and faith that we, this small country that we love, could turn it into a paradise,” said a Lebanese Christian woman, Sophia Blanche Rouillard, carrying a black flag to work in Beirut.
The fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, their latest round of warfare in four decades of on-off conflict, has been waged in parallel with Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas, which began after the Iranian-backed Palestinian group’s attack against Israel on 7 Oct 2023. The group has said it will cease fighting only when Israel’s offensive in Gaza ends.
Gideon Saar, the Israeli opposition lawmaker, will rejoin Netanyahu’s government, the two said on Sunday, in a step that is likely to strengthen the premier politically.
The hawkish Saar, who has been one of Netanyahu’s most vocal critics in the past few years, is due to serve as a minister without a portfolio and have a seat in the prime minister’s security cabinet, Israeli television station N12 said.
Saar and Netanyahu said they were putting their past rifts aside. “We will work together, shoulder to shoulder, and I intend to seek his [Saar’s] assistance in the forums that influence the conduct of the war,” Netanyahu said.