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Tag: Hezbollah
Israel accused of killing dozens of Syria troops and Hezbollah fighters with major airstrikes near Aleppo
Beirut — The Syrian army said Friday that Israeli airstrikes near the northern city of Aleppo had killed or wounded “a number of” people and caused damage. A war monitoring group said the strikes killed 44 people, most of them Syrian troops.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor group, said Israeli strikes hit missile depots belonging to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group in Aleppo’s southern suburb of Jibreen, near the Aleppo International Airport, and the nearby town of Safira, home to a sprawling military facility.
The observatory said 36 Syrian troops, seven Hezbollah fighters and a Syrian member of an Iran-backed group died and dozens of people were wounded, calling it the deadliest such attack in years.
There was no immediate statement from Israeli officials on the strikes specifically, but Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was quoted by the Times of Israel’s defense correspondent as saying hours after that the military would be expanding its ongoing campaign against the powerful Iran-allied group, and that Israel was “turning from defending to pursuing Hezbollah.”
“We will reach wherever the organization operates, in Beirut, Damascus and in more distant places,” Gallant said, according to Times reporter Emanuel Fabian.
Israel, which has vowed to stop Iranian entrenchment in its northern neighbor, has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets in government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years, but it rarely acknowledges them.
On Thursday, Syrian state media reported airstrikes near the capital, Damascus, saying they wounded two civilians.
Hezbollah has had an armed presence in Syria since it joined the country’s civil conflict more than a decade ago, fighting alongside government forces.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and once its commercial center, has come under such attacks in the past that led to the closure of its international airport. Friday’s strike did not affect the airport.
The strikes have escalated over the past five months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and ongoing clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border.
Hezbollah is an ally of Gaza’s Hamas rulers, who sparked the current war with their bloody Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Both groups are considered part of the network of armed proxy forces backed by Iran across the Middle East.
In neighboring Lebanon, an Israeli drone strike hit a car near the southern port city of Tyre and killed a Hezbollah member, Lebanese state media reported. Israel’s military said the targeted man was Ali Naim, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile program. The group confirmed he was killed, without stating what his job was within the organization.
The drone strike that killed Naim came a day after Hezbollah fired rockets with heavy warheads at towns in northern Israel, saying it used the weapons against civilian targets for the first time in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes the night before that killed nine people, including what the group said were several paramedics.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, concerns have grown that near-daily clashes along the border between Israel and Lebanon could escalate into a full-scale war, which could draw in other countries including Iran.
Israel and Hezbollah trade strikes over Lebanon border
Hezbollah has fired a barrage of rockets into northern Israel, killing one person, in response to deadly Israeli strikes on a Lebanese village.
Lebanese sources said seven people were killed in the Israeli attack overnight on Habbariyeh, making it one of the deadliest in recent violence.
Israel said militants were killed, including one involved in attacks on Israel.
The Lebanese group targeted said those killed were “rescuers”.
The strikes come as Israel and Hezbollah trade almost daily strikes across the border, which began with the start of the Israel-Gaza war following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.
Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Muslim militant group with close ties to Iran and an ally of Hamas.
Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets at the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona and a military base there on Wednesday morning.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service said a factory worker was pulled from wreckage after one of the strikes hit an industrial park triggering a fire.
He had severe wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene, it added.
Hezbollah said the rocket attacks were “in response to the massacre in Habbariyeh”.
Lebanese officials said the strikes on the village had hit an emergency and relief centre for Jamaa Islamiya, a Sunni Muslim group with links to Hamas.
The Lebanese Ambulance Association, quoted by the Associated Press, called the strike a “flagrant violation of humanitarian work”.
The Israel Defense Forces described the target as a “military compound”.
They said: “A significant terrorist operative belonging to the Jamaa Islamiya organisation who advanced attacks against Israeli territory was eliminated along with additional terrorists who were with him.”
According to UN figures from before the latest attacks, 316 people have been killed in Lebanon since the conflict began, at least 54 of them civilians.
Up to 20 have lost their lives on the Israeli side, around half of them civilians.
Lebanese Sunni militant group head says coordination with Shiite Hezbollah is vital to fight Israel
BEIRUT (AP) — The head of a Lebanese Sunni political and militant group that has joined the Shiite militant group Hezbollah in its fight against Israel on Lebanon’s border said Tuesday that the conflict has helped strengthen cooperation between the two groups.
The Secretary-General of al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Group, Sheikh Mohammed Takkoush said his faction decided to join the fighting along the Lebanon-Israel border because of Israel’s crushing offensive on the Gaza Strip and its strikes against Lebanese towns and villages killing civilians, including journalists, since the Israel-Hamas war started on Oct.7.
“We decided to join (the battle) as a national, religious and moral duty. We did that to defend our land and villages,” Takkoush told The Associated Press at his group’s headquarters in Beirut. “We also did so in support of our brothers in Gaza,” where he said Israel was committing an “open massacre.”
Hamas led a surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. The ensuing Israeli bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians there, according to local health officials. Since then, violence along the Lebanon-Israel border intensified, displacing tens of thousands of people on both sides
Takkoush said he believed Israel has ambitions to seize more territory “not only in Palestine but in Lebanon too.”
The Islamic Group is one of Lebanon’s main Sunni factions but has kept a low profile politically over the years. It has one member in Lebanon’s 128-seat legislature. Elections within the group in 2022 brought its leadership closer to Hamas.
Like Hamas, it is inspired by the ideology of the Pan-Arab Islamist political movement The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by a school teacher-turned-Islamic ideologue Hassan al-Banna.
It carries out attacks against Israel mainly from the southern city of Sidon where the group once enjoyed wide influence.
Takkoush said his group makes its own decisions in the field but coordinates closely with Hezbollah, and with the Lebanese branch of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“Part of (the attacks against Israeli forces) were in coordination with Hamas, which coordinates with Hezbollah,” he said adding that direct cooperation with Hezbollah “is on the rise and this is being reflected in the field.” He did not elaborate further.
While the Lebanese border area is seen as a Hezbollah stronghold and its population is primarily Shiite, it also has Sunni villages, where the Islamic Group primarily operates.
The tensions between Islam’s two main sects — Sunni and Shiite — originated following the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632. It has reverberated across the wider Middle East till the present day thus making cooperation between Hezbollah and al-Jamaa al-Islamiya all the more rare.
The Islamic Group’s armed wing, known as the Fajr Forces, has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks along the Lebanon-Israel border since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
They have lost five fighters so far, Takkoush said, with three killed in an Israeli airstrike in a border area earlier this month.
The other two were killed in a Jan. 2, Israeli strike on an apartment in Beirut that targeted top Hamas official Saleh Arouri.
The group’s use of weapons against Israel is not new. It founded its Fajr Forces in 1982 at the height of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 ending an 18-year occupation. But the Lebanese government says Israel still occupies the disputed Chebaa Farms and Kfar Chouba hills that Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Mideast war.
In the current conflict, “coordinating and cooperating with a movement like Hamas, the most honorable liberation movement, is an honor,” Takkoush said.
Regarding his group’s relations with Hezbollah, Takkoush said it had gone through ups and downs. They had differences regarding the conflicts in Syria and Yemen but put them aside “to resist the Israeli occupation of parts of our Lebanese territories,” he said.
“Our relations with Hezbollah are good and growing and it is being strengthened as we go through war,” Takkoush said.
Takkoush added that all the weapons they use, from bullets to rockets, are from their own arsenal. “We did not get even a bullet from any side,” he said.
As Hezbollah has solidified its position as the most powerful political and military entity in Lebanon, the country’s Sunni community has floundered in the absence of a strong leader.
Asked whether the Islamic Group is trying to fill the gap in Lebanon’s Sunni political leadership left behind by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri who quit politics two years ago, Takkoush said that Prime Minister Saad Hariri still has a base of support and popularity, but his group was not in the habit of filling anyone’s absence.
“We introduce ourselves as partners in building generations and (state) institutions but we do not replace anyone,” he said.
Head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah urges halt to Palestinian camp clashes
BEIRUT (Reuters) – The head of powerful armed group Hezbollah called on Tuesday for a halt to days of deadly clashes that have raged between rival factions in the Palestinian camp of Ain el-Hilweh in southern Lebanon.
At least 11 people – most of them militants – have been killed in the camp since fighting broke out on Saturday between mainstream faction Fatah and hardline Islamists, security sources in the camp told Reuters.
“This fighting must not continue because its repercussions are bad – for the camp’s residents, for the dear Palestinian people… for the south, for all of Lebanon,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address.
The United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said at least 2,000 people have fled their homes in the camp and UNRWA activities were suspended due to the violence.
Negotiations between the rival factions have led to brief suspensions of fighting but have failed to secure a lasting ceasefire, with heavy clashes resuming on Tuesday.
Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon and is vehemently opposed to Israel, has ties to Palestinian factions and supports their cause.
Nasrallah on Tuesday said anyone who could “pressure, say a word, make contact, make an effort” to secure a truce should do so.
UNRWA estimates that up to 250,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps, which date back to the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The camps mainly lie outside the jurisdiction of Lebanese security services.
Nasrallah also ramped up his rhetoric on Tuesday against those burning copies of the Muslim holy book the Koran in Denmark and Sweden in recent weeks, saying the weak response from Muslim states had left believers wanting.
“There is no longer any meaning to waiting for anyone. You must take up this responsibility and punish these damned people with the strongest punishment,” Nasrallah said.
Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and is classified by the United States and other Western countries as a terrorist organisation.
Last year, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old Shi’ite Muslim American, was charged with the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, author of the 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses,” viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages.
Matar’s family originally hails from Yaroun, where Hezbollah has strong support. A Hezbollah official at the time said the group had no information on the attack and Nasrallah declined to comment directly on it.
(Reporting by Laila Bassam and Maya Gebeily; Editing by Alistair Bell)
Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader urges Muslims to ‘punish’ Quran desecrators if governments fail to do so
BAGHDAD (AP) — The leader of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah said Saturday that if governments of Muslim-majority nations do not act against countries that allow the desecration of the Quran, Muslims should “punish” those who facilitate attacks on Islam’s holy book.
The comments by Hassan Nasrallah came in a video address to tens of thousands gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs to mark Ashoura, a Shiite holy day commemorating the 7th century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein.
Nasrallah often uses religious occasions to send political messages to followers, and on Saturday slammed recent incidents in which the Quran was burned or otherwise desecrated at authorized demonstrations in Sweden and Denmark.
He said Muslims should watch for the outcome of an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, scheduled to take place in Baghdad on Monday to discuss the organization’s response to the Quran burnings.
The organization and its member states should “send a firm, decisive and unequivocal message to these governments that any repeat of the attacks will be met with a boycott,” Nasrallah said. If they do not, he said, Muslim youth should “punish the desecrators.”
He did not elaborate what such a boycott and punishment should entail.
Members of the crowd, who carried banners with religious slogans alongside the flags of Hezbollah, Lebanon and Palestine, chanted, “Oh, Quran, we are at your service; Oh, Hussein, we are at your service.”
Shiites represent over 10% of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims and view Hussein as the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Hussein’s death in battle at the hands of Sunnis at Karbala, south of Baghdad, ingrained a deep rift in Islam and continues to this day to play a key role in shaping Shiite identity.
Millions of Shiite Muslims in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and around the world on Friday commemorated Ashoura, while Saturday marked the culmination of the observances in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered in the Iraqi city of Karbala, where Hussein is entombed in a gold-domed shrine. In the streets of the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, mourners gathered to watch reenactments of the Battle of Karbala and Hussein’s death.
In the streets, young men clad in black and white slashed their heads with swords and knives to demonstrate their grief. Friends swabbed each other’s heads with tissues and handed each other water.
In Syria’s capital, Damascus, the crowds were mourning not only the death of Hussein but a deadly attack in the suburb of Sayida Zeinab, home to a shrine to Zeinab, the daughter of the first Shiite imam, Ali, and granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
A bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded there on Thursday, killing at least six people and wounding dozens more. On Tuesday, another bomb in a motorcycle had wounded two people.
On Friday, the Islamic State group — a Sunni militant group that often targets Shiites — claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying Thursday’s bombing came “during their annual polytheistic rituals.” The group’s extreme interpretation of Islam holds Shiite Muslims to be apostates.
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Associated Press writers Anmar Khalil in Karbala, Iraq, and Hassan Ammar in Beirut contributed to this report.