In parallel with a security escalation along the Lebanese borders with Israel, Tel Aviv accused Iran of “deploying great efforts to transfer advanced combat means to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and large quantities of ammunition, exactly as the United States is helping us.”
Sources in Tel Aviv pointed to foreign reports that said that Israeli Air Force planes in recent days attacked Syrian airports, especially in Aleppo and Damascus, destroying large arms convoys that were on their way to Lebanon.
The sources added that the Israeli air effort was currently focused mainly in Gaza, but with high alert in the north.
The past two days witnessed a significant escalation in the exchange of bombing between Israel and Hezbollah. While Hezbollah announced a series of bombing operations targeting specific targets in northern Israel, causing sirens to sound in about ten towns, Israel responded with widespread bombing in several Lebanese villages.
Israel considered Hezbollah’s operations a challenge. A military source told Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that six Israelis have been killed so far in the area, since the outbreak of the war on Gaza, which is an abnormal number by any standard. However, they added that it was difficult to highlight this number in light of the enormous catastrophe in the towns surrounding Gaza or in comparison with Hezbollah’s dead, whose number exceeded seventy.
Israeli army reports indicated that the bombing on several occasions came on its own initiative, and not in response to the firing of Hezbollah shells, with the purpose of sending a warning to Lebanon that it was “beginning to lose patience.”
The army said that its forces attacked several targets in Lebanese territory belonging to Hezbollah, including a weapons depot, military infrastructure, and launching sites, and that they destroyed the majority of the observation points that the party had established on the border.
On the other hand, Hezbollah announced in successive statements that it had targeted several Israeli sites.
