Israel on Monday battled on multiple fronts, intensifying its fight with Lebanon’s Hezbollah as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to press the “sacred mission” against Israel’s enemies, on the first anniversary of the deadliest attack in Israeli history.
Hamas said it will be a long fight, but Netanyahu said both wars would ensure the violence Israel endured last October 7 could never be repeated.
Israel’s military said air defences intercepted a missile fired from Yemen, while in the West Bank, Palestinian officials reported a deadly Israeli raid.
Tehran, which arms and finances Hezbollah and backs the Yemeni rebels, hailed Hamas’s October 7 attack as Iran awaits what Israel said will be retaliation for an Iranian missile barrage on Israel last week.
“As long as the enemy threatens our existence and the peace of our country, we will continue to fight. As long as our hostages are still in Gaza, we will continue to fight,” Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded television address, vowing not to give up on the “sacred mission” of achieving the war’s goals.
Pope Francis condemned the “shameful inability” of world powers to end the Middle East conflict, and European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the region is “on the verge of a complete conflagration”.
Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said the movement chooses “to keep up the fight in a long war of attrition, one that is painful and costly for the enemy”.
He also said scores of people taken hostage into Gaza last October 7 were enduring a “very difficult” situation.
– Thousands of militants killed –
A senior Hamas official has acknowledged that “several thousand fighters from the movement and other resistance groups died in combat”.
When the Gaza war began, Netanyahu vowed to “crush” Hamas, but troops have found themselves returning again to areas to confront signs the movement was trying to rebuild.
Netanyahu has vowed to bring home the hostages, but critics in Israel have accused him of obstructing mediation for a truce and hostage-release deal.
Late last month Israel turned its focus north towards Hezbollah, with intensified air strikes in Lebanon and, since last week, “targeted” ground raids.
Netanyahu says the aim is to ensure tens of thousands of Israelis forced to flee Hezbollah fire can return home safely.
On Monday the military said it would expand its operations against Hezbollah to Lebanon’s coast south of the Al-Awali river, and warned people to stay away.
It also declared a “closed military zone” near the coast in Israel’s extreme northwest, near Shlomi, after a similar declaration last week to the northeast in the Metula area.
The military said Hezbollah fired about 135 projectiles into Israel Monday and Israeli forces hit back by striking “over 120 terror targets in southern Lebanon within an hour”.
Late Monday, Lebanese state media reported more Israeli strikes on Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold, which has been repeatedly pounded even after a bombing killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
– More troops deployed –
Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli soldiers in two south Lebanon border villages, including Maroun al-Ras where it has reported previous clashes. The army said it had deployed another division for operations across the border.
At least four projectiles were fired from Gaza just after October 7 commemorations began, Israel’s military said, adding it retaliated against militant infrastructure throughout Gaza.
Hamas said it fired rockets near the border with Gaza and at Tel Aviv, while Hezbollah twice said it had launched rockets at areas north of Haifa, a major coastal city.
As troops fought what Israel says is a war for its very existence, vigils at massacre sites and rallies called for the return of hostages a year after their abduction.
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Late Monday in Tel Aviv, musicians performed as victims’ images flashed on screens at a ceremony attended by families and relatives of those killed and abducted.
“We know in our minds, our hearts, in every cell in our bodies: there will be no rehabilitation without the return of the hostages. All of them,” said Nitza Corngold, whose son Tal Shoham was seized.
The day began with President Isaac Herzog leading a moment’s silence at 6:29 am — the time the attack began — in Reim, a kibbutz community where Hamas fighters killed at least 370 people at the Nova music festival, that day’s deadliest attack.
It began when Hamas fired thousands of rockets at nearby Israeli communities.
At the same time militants stormed across Gaza’s fortified border and attacked nearly 50 different sites, including kibbutzim communities and army bases.
Militants went door-to-door shooting residents dead.
– Gaza’s ‘graveyard’ –
Hours later, Israel launched a military offensive that has reduced swathes of Gaza to rubble, and displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million residents at least once amid an unrelenting humanitarian crisis.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on X Monday the war had turned Gaza into a “graveyard”.
Of the 251 people taken hostage into Gaza, 97 are still being held, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
According to Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry, 41,909 people, the majority civilians, have been killed there since the start of the war. The figures have been deemed reliable by the United Nations.
Since Israel’s escalation in Lebanon began in late September, more than 1,110 people have been killed and more than one million are displaced, official figures show.
Violence has also soared in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian health ministry says more than 700 people have been killed since the Hamas attack, including two on Monday during Israeli raids.
Israel’s military says 349 soldiers have been killed since the Gaza ground offensive began on October 27.
People in Gaza just want the war to end.
“I have grown old while watching my children hungry, scared, having nightmares and screaming day and night from the sound of the bombing and shells,” said one displaced woman, Israa Abu Matar, 26.
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