Israel expands attacks on Hezbollah as Iran warns of retaliation

Less than a week after Israel killed Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli warplanes bombarded areas south of Beirut around midnight Thursday, this time targeting his presumed successor.

It was unclear Friday whether the strikes in Lebanon had succeeded in killing the group's potential next leader, Hashem Safeiddine, a cousin of Nasrallah's. And it was difficult to assess the scale of the damage from the bombardment, described as the heaviest of the rapidly escalating war in Lebanon.

But it was clear from the images of destroyed buildings, now merely broken concrete and twisted metal, along with Israel's ground invasion in the south, that Israel was determined to take the fight against Hezbollah to a new level.

It's doing so not just in southern Lebanon, where its ground invasion is seeking to halt Hezbollah's rocket fire into northern Israel, but also with its systematic targeting of the Iran-backed group's remaining leaders, whose movements Israeli intelligence apparently still track.

Many people in Lebanon and the broader Middle East had long feared that such a war was coming, even before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that began the war in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel shortly afterward in solidarity with Hamas, an ally.

Over the past three weeks, Israel has stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies owned by its members, dropping bunker-busting bombs on Lebanese sites where the group's leaders were thought to be meeting and assassinating Nasrallah and other Hezbollah commanders.

A few days after Israel launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon in a bid, it said, to destroy Hezbollah's military infrastructure -- its first such invasion since 2006 -- the fighting has intensified far beyond the Lebanon-Israel border where the warring parties initially clashed. Israel's airstrikes have killed civilians, brought down buildings, and sent up huge clouds of smoke in and around Beirut and elsewhere in the country.

One strike on Friday left a large crater near a border crossing with Syria, forcing people fleeing from one war-torn country to another to carry their luggage around the crater's rim.

At least 11 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat around the Lebanese border, including two in northern Israel, the military announced Friday.

Hezbollah, though battered by Israel's recent attacks, still fires barrages of rockets over the border, as well as missiles that reach deep inside Israel and send people running for shelters. On Friday, about 100 missiles and other projectiles were fired from Lebanon into Israel, the Israeli military said.

Tensions spiked after Iran fired about 200 missiles at Israel this week and Israel vowed to retaliate. Israel and its allies, including the United States, shot down most of the missiles, but one man in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was killed.

On Friday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who led Friday prayers for the first time in nearly five years, warned of further strikes against Israel, using a memorial service for Nasrallah in Tehran to praise the Oct. 7 attacks and to express solidarity with Palestinians and Hezbollah.

"What our armed forces did was the least punishment they could do," Khamenei said, adding, "What is logical and rational will be done at the right time and will be done again in the future if necessary."

Khamenei also called Israel "bloodthirsty" and said that "any strike on the Zionist regime is a service to humanity."

Iranian state television showed tens of thousands of supporters packing the arena where he spoke, with others spilling into the streets of central Tehran, the capital. Some waved Hezbollah, Lebanese and Palestinian flags and held up posters of Nasrallah.

Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, told reporters that the ceremony was intended to "project a show of unity, cohesion and power."

Despite Iranian leaders' official rhetoric, many Iranians have said in interviews, in virtual town halls and in social media posts that they were anxious about a war with Israel and that they do not want one.

As Israel weighs its options, President Joe Biden said at a White House news briefing Friday that he planned on speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he assumed that when Israeli officials "make their judgment about how they're going to respond, we will then have a discussion."

Biden said this week that he would oppose an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities but that the United States was "discussing" the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran's oil facilities. Biden said any Israeli retaliation must be in "proportion" to Iran's missile assault.

"The Israelis have every right to respond to the vicious attacks on them, not just from the Iranians, but from everyone," Biden said, adding, "They have to be very much more careful about dealing with civilian casualties."

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, suggested that a diplomatic path was still possible. He was visiting Lebanon after meetings in Qatar earlier in the week with leaders of Gulf countries, where he and Pezeshkian endeavored to shore up relations with some of Iran's closest neighbors.

"Iran supports the efforts for a cease-fire, provided that, first, the rights of the Lebanese people are respected and it is accepted by the resistance, and second, it comes simultaneously with a cease-fire in Gaza," Araghchi said, according to Iranian state media. The "resistance" refers to the armed groups that Iran supports throughout the Middle East.

The prospects for a cease-fire, however, appear to have dimmed as the Israel-Hamas nears one year. Israeli attacks in Gaza killed at least 99 people Wednesday and Thursday, according to local health officials. And U.S. negotiators say they believe that Hamas has no intention of reaching a truce deal with Israel.

The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders for Lebanese on Friday, bringing to 87 the number of Lebanese communities whose residents have been warned to leave in advance of Israeli strikes. Many of the areas are north of a stretch of southern Lebanon that was designated by the United Nations to be free of militia forces after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Israeli military also said Friday evening that its air force had struck several Hezbollah weapons storage facilities, command centers and other infrastructure in the area of Beirut in the past day. It said it also had struck Hezbollah intelligence targets in Beirut.

Israel has said it is trying to stop Hezbollah's attacks on northern Israeli so that 60,000 displaced Israelis can return. At least 1,900 people have been killed by Israeli strikes over the past year, according to Lebanese health officials, whose tallies do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. About 1 million people have been forced from their homes, according to the United Nations.

UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, said more than 690 children had been injured in Lebanon, with most suffering concussions and other traumatic brain injuries, shrapnel wounds, limb injuries and hearing loss.

For many Lebanese, the conflict is one in a long line of human catastrophes.

Beirut's bullet-ridden apartment buildings serve as a daily reminder of Lebanon's bloody 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990. A crippling economic collapse that struck in 2019 has left much of the country in poverty, and residents grapple with chronic power cuts even as the capital is bombarded.

Many apartments now lie vacant in Beirut, a once-bustling Mediterranean city and home to 2.5 million people.

"All my dreams are about bombs," said Heba Jundi, 36, who had fled Beirut and was staying at a friend's house in the mountains with her cat, Benji.

"We are all waiting for this to stop," she added, "but at the same time we know it is not going to stop."