Israel conducts ‘limited’ ground operations against Hezbollah; UK foreign minister repeats calls for ceasefire

British foreign minister David Lammy repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire amid reports of a potential escalation in the Israel-Lebanon conflict, after discussing the matter with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken by phone on Monday.

Indications grew on Monday that Israel was on the verge of sending ground troops into Lebanon, two weeks into an assault on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia that culminated in the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel conducts ‘limited’ ground operations against Hezbollah

Israel has told the US it is conducting limited ground operations focused on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon near the border with Israel, the State Department said on Monday.

“This is what they have informed us that they are currently conducting, which are limited operations targeting Hezbollah infrastructure near the border,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.

Asked to confirm they were limited ground operations, he said: “That is our understanding.”

Miller said the US continued to support a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, but added that military pressure could at times enable diplomacy. He cautioned that military pressure could also lead to miscalculation and unintended consequences.

UK foreign minister repeats calls for ceasefire

British foreign minister David Lammy repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire amid reports of a potential escalation in the Israel-Lebanon conflict, after discussing the matter with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the phone on Monday.

“We’ve both seen the reports in the media about a next phase for Israel in Lebanon,” Lammy told Sky News, amid growing indications that Israel was on the verge of sending ground troops into Lebanon.

“We both agreed the position that we had at the UN last week that the best way forward is an immediate ceasefire and to get back to a political solution.”

Lebanon ground incursion seems imminent, says US official

Indications grew on Monday that Israel was on the verge of sending ground troops into Lebanon, two weeks into an assault on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia that culminated in the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

A US official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Reuters the positioning of Israeli troops suggested a ground incursion could be imminent.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told local council heads in northern Israel that the next phase of the war along Lebanon’s southern border would begin soon, and support the aim of bringing home Israelis who have fled Hezbollah rockets during nearly a year of border warfare.

He also told troops: “We will use all the means that may be required — your forces, other forces, from the air, from the sea, and on land. Good luck.”

Amal Al-Hourani, the mayor of Jdeidet Marjayoun, a Christian-majority Lebanese village less than 10km from the border, told Reuters that two locals had received calls apparently from the Israeli army telling them to evacuate the area as soon as possible.

Friday’s assassination of Nasrallah — the most powerful leader in Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance” against Israeli and US interests in the Middle East — was one of the heaviest blows in decades to both Hezbollah and Iran.

After two weeks of intensive airstrikes and a string of assassinations of Hezbollah commanders, Israel has suggested ever more strongly that a land invasion is looming.

The Washington Post cited an unidentified US official as saying Israel had already told the US the operation would be smaller than its 2006 war against Hezbollah and focus on border security.

Asked about the reports, US President Joe Biden, who has so far had little success urging Israel to rein in its assaults on Hezbollah or on the Hamas militia in Gaza, called for a ceasefire.

“I’m comfortable with them stopping,” he told reporters.

Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem, in a first public speech since Israeli airstrikes killed Nasrallah, said that “the resistance forces are ready for a ground engagement”.

As he spoke, Israeli airstrikes in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon continued, extending a campaign that has eliminated several Hezbollah commanders but also killed about 1,000 civilians and forced one million to flee their homes, according to the Lebanese government.

The death toll from an Israeli strike on the southern Lebanese town of Ain Deleb rose to 45, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Monday.

Hours before Qassem spoke, Hamas said an Israeli airstrike had killed its leader in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, along with his wife, son and daughter in the city of Tyre.

Another faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said three of its leaders had died in a strike in Beirut’s Kola district, the first Israeli attack so close to the city centre.

The Israeli attacks on militant targets in Lebanon are part of a conflict stretching from the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the occupied West Bank to Iranian-backed groups in Yemen and Iraq.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said Tehran would not let any of Israel’s “criminal acts” go unanswered, referring to the killings of Nasrallah and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps deputy commander, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, who died in the same strikes.

Erdoğan says UN should recommend force if Israel not stopped

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday that the United Nations General Assembly should recommend the use of force, in line with a resolution it passed in 1950, if the UN Security Council fails to stop Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon.

Nato member Turkey has denounced Israel’s devastating attack in Gaza against the Palestinian militant group Hamas and condemned its recent attacks in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah militants. It has halted all trade with Israel and applied to join a genocide case against Israel at the World Court, which Israel rejects.

“The UN General Assembly should rapidly implement the authority to recommend the use of force, as it did with the 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution, if the Security Council can’t show the necessary will,” said Erdoğan after a cabinet meeting in Ankara.

The resolution says the UN General Assembly can step in if disagreements among the Security Council’s five permanent veto-wielding powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — mean they fail to maintain international peace.

The Security Council is the only UN body that can normally make legally binding decisions, such as authorising the use of force and imposing sanctions.

UNRWA chief denies knowing that suspended employee was Hamas leader

The chief of the UN Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) on Monday denied knowing that its employee Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was a Hamas commander in Lebanon and called on states to push back against Israeli attacks on the agency.

El-Amin, the head of Hamas’s Lebanon branch, was killed along with family members in an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon, the group said on Monday. He had been placed under investigation and suspended from his job at UNRWA in March following allegations concerning his politics, agency head Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva.

“The specific allegation at the time was that [he was] a part of the local leadership... I never heard the word commander before,” he said. “What’s obvious for you today, was not obvious yesterday.”

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said el-Amin had been on administrative leave without pay since March — “as soon as UNRWA received information about his possible involvement with Hamas at a senior level” — and had never been reinstated.

UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) was established in 1949 and provides relief to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, including in Lebanon where it says up to 250,000 reside. DM

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