The Israeli military issued new evacuation warnings on Thursday for four neighborhoods in the Dahiya, a densely populated area near Beirut that has been a frequent target of its airstrikes, a day after it said six Israeli soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Lebanon.
Avichai Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, warned residents of the neighborhoods to leave their homes. In a social media post in Arabic, he advised them to stay 500 meters away from specific buildings against which he said the military “will operate in the near future.”
The Israeli military gave no details of how the six soldiers were killed on Wednesday, one of the deadliest days for Israeli forces since they invaded southern Lebanon last month to battle Hezbollah fighters. The killings showed that the Iran-backed militant group remained a deadly adversary despite Israel inflicting severe blows. Since the invasion began, Israel has assassinated most of Hezbollah’s leaders and killed and maimed thousands of rank-and-file members, while launching airstrikes that have displaced almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
The offensive began after almost a year of near-daily cross-border rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Israel that also forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in northern Israel. Hezbollah began firing on Israel the day after the Hamas-led terror attack last October, and said its bombardment was a sign of solidarity with its Gaza-based ally.
On Thursday, Israel’s military said it had killed a large number of Hezbollah fighters over the past week and had “struck and dismantled” more than 140 Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon.
It also said it had intercepted several drones launched at Israel, some toward the country’s north and at least one other toward the southern city of Eilat. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which like Hezbollah and Hamas is backed by Iran, claimed responsibility for four drones that had been aimed at northern Israel. There were no reports of damage from the attempted drone attacks.
In Gaza, Israel continued to press ahead with a weekslong offensive in the northern part of the territory, which it says has become the locus of a Hamas resurgence. The military said on Thursday that it had launched airstrikes and ground raids over the past day that had killed Hamas fighters there.
Israel’s offensive in northern Gaza has drawn international criticism for its heavy toll on civilians, several hundred thousand of whom became trapped there when the operation began last month, according to United Nations agencies. Tens of thousands have since fled their homes.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report that accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity for forcing nearly all of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians to flee their homes, and often advising them later to move from the places where they had sought shelter. Israel has said it warns residents to evacuate for their own safety.
“There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times,” the report said. “Rather than ensuring civilians’ security, military ‘evacuation orders’ have caused grave harm.”
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