Israel and Hezbollah are seeing some of the heaviest bombardments since October 8th, hundreds of rockets fired, as Israel retaliates with airstrikes in Lebanon. Hezbollah says they are entering “an open-ended battle of reckoning”, @marcusmoore reports. https://t.co/pYFnLhO4Ri pic.twitter.com/i0fz2fntr0
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) September 22, 2024
It seems as though if Hezbollah had the ability to do anything to Israel, they would have started doing it after the pager attack. Or, perhaps, a long time before that.
They keep announcing these “battles,” and then they just get bombed into oblivion.
One would assume they have the ability to up the rocket attacks, but if they could actually do serious damage deep inside of Israel, they would have been doing that by now, instead of doing constant announcements.
Hezbollah has said it has entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with Israel after launching a series of rocket attacks on the north of the country as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.
In a significant escalation of the conflict, Israeli warplanes carried out their most intense bombardment in almost a year across southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah responded with its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The events prompted the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to warn of the risk “of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza”.
During a funeral for a top commander killed along with 44 other people in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general, Naim Qassem, said on Sunday that an “open-ended battle of reckoning has started”. “Threats will not stop us,” he said. “We are ready to face all military possibilities.”
As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for de-escalation to avoid a war as authorities said four people had been killed and nine injured over the weekend. But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was also trenchant in his rhetoric.
“In the last few days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it did not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you it will understand the message,” he said.
Everyone hopes Hezbollah ups their game and starts actually doing something.
But at this point, that seems very unlikely.
No country can accept the wanton rocketing of its cities. We can’t accept it either. pic.twitter.com/Gkw8ruxFsc
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) September 22, 2024