This can only be described as a turning point. In a single day, Monday 23 September, Israeli aircraft attacked 1,600 targets in Lebanon, linked to Hezbollah and its weapons stockpiles. The human cost of these operations is proportional to this intensity: 492 deaths were recorded on Tuesday morning, compared to just over 600 deaths (including nearly 500 in the ranks of Hezbollah) since the start of the conflict on 8 October 2023. On that day, the low-intensity war of the past eleven months was transformed into a high-intensity confrontation.
The strikes hit numerous inhabited areas, in direct implementation of a statement by Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israeli army, who on Monday morning ordered anyone in a house near a missile arsenal to launch Hezbollah rockets from the “leave the premises as quickly as possible if [elle] I don’t want to[ait] No [se] endanger”. A new Israeli attack in the southern suburbs of Beirut targeted a senior Hezbollah leader, Ali Karaki, who survived the attack, according to the Shiite party.
Hezbollah is also gaining strength, albeit at a slower pace. According to the military correspondent of the left-wing daily HaaretzOn Monday, rockets were launched towards previously unreached areas, in particular towards the Jewish settlement of Ariel in the West Bank. But these shots were intercepted by anti-aircraft protection systems. The rockets also targeted the towns of Afula and Megiddo, according to the Party of God, without causing significant damage. In the following hours, the Israeli army claimed to have destroyed the exact point from which the shots came, while continuing the incessant bombardment, which hit dozens of targets in southern Lebanon.
This massive attack operation in Lebanon is in full swing, which the Israeli army has warned since June that it is carefully preparing and whose general lines were decided in July, awaiting the green light from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Once this was given at the beginning of September, this new phase was made official on Wednesday by Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, who specified that the “center of gravity” The war that was already raging in the south, in Gaza, was now moving north. Attacks on booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies that same week served as a prelude to this sudden escalation.
Establish a “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon
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