Israel-Hezbollah latest: Israeli special forces ‘conducting Lebanon raids’ ahead of possible ground invasion

Smoke is rising from Beirut’s southern suburbs after a suspected Israeli strike, witness have told Reuters.

Lebanese media have suggsted the smoke this is the result of the collapse of a building, rather than an airstrike.

Palestinian militant group Hamas said an Israeli strike killed its leader in Lebanon on Monday, while another Palestinian militant group said three of its leaders were killed in a strike on Beirut, the first attack within the city limits.

Hamas said its leader in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed, along with his wife, son, and daughter, in a strike that targeted their house in a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern city of Tyre in the early hours of Monday.

As Israel escalates hostilities against Iran’s allies in the region, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said three of its leaders were killed in a strike that targeted Beirut’s Kola district.

The strike hit the upper floor of an apartment building, Reuters witnesses said.

Hassan Nasrallah’s death is not only an enormous blow to Hezbollah but also to Iran, whose Revolutionary Guards founded the group in 1982.

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Pope Francis suggested Sunday that Israel‘s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been “immoral” and disproportionate, saying its military domination has gone beyond the rules of war.

Francis was asked en route home from Belgium about Israel’s targeted killing of one of Hezbollah’s founding members, Hassan Nasrallah. Friday’s strike in Beirut targeted an area greater than a city block and reduced several residential buildings to rubble, and at least six other deaths have been confirmed.

Francis didn’t mention Israel by name and said he was speaking in general terms. But he said that “the defense must always be proportionate to the attack.”

“When there is something disproportionate, there is a dominating tendency that goes beyond morality,” he said. “A country that does these things — and I’m talking about any country — in a superlative way, these are immoral actions.”

He said that even if war itself is immoral, there are rules that “indicate some morality.”

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The Israeli military says it has uncovered and dismantled a Hamas tunnel in central Gaza that was over a kilometre (0.6 miles) long.

It said the tunnel ran near homes, and that inside were several rooms and equipment used by militants for prolonged stays.

The military released footage showing the entrance to the tunnel, a long staircase leading down and what appeared to be an iron blast door.

Hamas is believed to have built hundreds of miles of tunnels across Gaza to evade Israeli airstrikes. The militants have also used the tunnels to hold hostages captured in the 7 October attack that triggered the war and to launch ambushes against Israeli forces.

Hamas’s top commander in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, has been killed in an Israeli strike, the militant group confirmed on Monday.

Some of el-Amin’s family members were also killed during the airstrike in the south of the country.

In just a few hours this weekend, the number of displaced people in Lebanon surged from 300,000 to nearly one million, according to Nasser Yassin, Lebanon’s head of emergency disaster management.

Despite opening hundreds of shelters, Mr Yassin warned that Lebanon is on the brink of a “catastrophic” humanitarian crisis. The country, already hosting 1.5 million Syrian and 250,000 Palestinian refugees, now has one million of its own people internally displaced due to ongoing Israeli strikes.

“We don’t want this to collapse fully, but we are on the verge of coming to a catastrophic humanitarian situation,” he told Sky News.

“We have been taking this on our shoulders, and now we have an additional burden of one million Lebanese people being displaced or affected by the current aggression.”

He criticised Israel’s tactic of announcing attacks on social media, calling it the “professionalisation of genocide”.

The US military says it killed 37 militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group in two strikes in Syria this month.

US Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on Tuesday, targeting a senior militant in charge of military operations for the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others.

It also said a large-scale airstrike on two weeks ago targeted an IS training camp in a remote location in central Syria. That attack killed 28 militants including “at least four Syrian leaders,” the US said.

There are 900 US forces in Syria, along with an undisclosed number of contractors, mostly trying to prevent any comeback by the extremist IS group, which swept through Iraq and Syria in 2014, taking control of large swaths of territory.

A Palestinian militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), alleged that three of its leaders were killed in an Israeli airstrike on central Beirut’s Kola district.

The attack comes as Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon killed over 1,000 people in the last two weeks, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, with a fifth of the population now displaced.

The strikes, previously limited to southern Beirut, have now spread to the city’s centre for the first time since 2006.

The Israeli military has not commented on the latest incident.

US president Joe Biden said that he planned to speak with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortly before Israel intensified its military actions in Lebanon.

Israel has launched its first airstrike on central Beirut since 2006. The strike followed a weekend of IDF attacks targeting Hezbollah, including the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Mr Biden said that there is a need to avoid an all-out war in the Middle East, adding that the US is working with international partners to de-escalate the situation. “It has to be. We really have to avoid it.”

“I’ll tell you what I say to him when I talk to him,” he said.