The Israeli military has said its troops “are operating in southern Lebanon” in a new ground incursion as it continues strikes in what it described in a statement as a “forward defence” measure along the border, with another front igniting in the regional war prompted by United States-Israel attacks on Iran.
A Lebanese military source has told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that the army has pulled its troops back from the border area to ensure their safety amid an escalation in Israeli attacks.
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Earlier, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the Lebanese army is evacuating “advanced positions” along the border with Israel, with the Reuters news agency reporting it has withdrawn from at least seven forward operating positions along the border, quoting witnesses.
A senior Hezbollah official says the recent Israeli attacks have left the group with “no option but to return to resistance”.
Israel wanted open war, “so let it be an open war”, said Mahmoud Qmati on Tuesday, adding that “the era of patience has ended.”
The moves come as Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel’s army had been instructed “to advance and seize additional controlling areas in Lebanon to prevent firing on Israeli border settlements”, following an earlier deployment of troops to the border.
“We have positioned soldiers on the border area in additional points to defend our civilians, to prevent Hezbollah from attacking them,” military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani said.
Israel’s announcement that its army is pushing further into southern Lebanon should be taken with “caution”, Ali Rizk, a security analyst based in Beirut, has told Al Jazeera.
He added that the statement is not necessarily a “prelude to something major on the ground”.
“We have to remember that when the Israelis resort to these tactics – land confrontations – it costs them very dearly,” Rizk said, adding that that was evident in the 2024 war.
Israel bombs Beirut again, Hezbollah fires drones
Israel has also bombed Lebanon’s capital Beirut for the second consecutive day as Hezbollah claimed an attack on an airbase in northern Israel.
New Israeli air raids on Tuesday afternoon hit Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, after at least three more attacks in the same area in the morning.
Lebanon’s state news agency said “a new series of intense Israeli air raids” targeted the suburb and caused “extensive damage to buildings”.
The Israeli military also issued forced displacement notices for some 59 areas in Lebanon, including several neighbourhoods in Dahiyeh, traditionally home to more of the Shia population, seen as a support base for Hezbollah.
In a post on the Telegram messaging app, it said it was striking “Hezbollah command centres and weapons storage facilities in Beirut”.
Civilians across Lebanon are continually caught in the crosshairs of Israeli attacks in Lebanon and have suffered thousands of deaths and mass displacement during the yearlong war in 2023-24, and in subsequent near-daily Israeli violations of a ceasefire up until the eruption of this new conflict days ago.
At least 30,000 displaced people have sought protection in shelters in Lebanon since hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah began on Monday, says the UNHCR.
“Many more slept in their cars on the side of roads or were still stuck in traffic jams on the roads,” said UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch.
Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett, reporting from Beirut, said this resulted in “a wave of displacement … We’ve seen civilians making their way out of there from the second these strikes began.
“This morning, schoolchildren are not heading to schools in Beirut because many of them are closed in order to take in the thousands and thousands of people who have been displaced from the southern suburbs.”
Hezbollah earlier said it had launched an attack on the Ramat David airbase in northern Israel, targeting radar sites and control rooms at the base by deploying “a swarm of drones” at dawn on Tuesday.
The Lebanese group added that it carried out the attack in retaliation against Israel’s strikes in several areas of Lebanon.
On Monday, Israeli strikes on Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon killed at least 52 people and injured 154, according to state-run media. The air raids came after Hezbollah fired a barrage of missiles and drones towards an Israeli military site in the northern city of Haifa for the first time in more than a year.
Aoun confirms Hezbollah military activity ban
Lebanon’s president says the government’s move to immediately ban Hezbollah’s military activity is “final”, declaring there is “no turning back” from the decision.
President Aoun said the cabinet’s ruling obliges Hezbollah to hand over its weapons to the state, underlining that the authority to decide matters of war and peace rests solely with Beirut.
In a statement posted on X, Aoun described Monday’s as a move that would “preserve the right of the Lebanese state alone, and no other, to hold the decision of war and peace”.
The decision followed renewed cross-border tensions after Hezbollah fired rockets towards Israel in response to hundreds of Israeli attacks carried out despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024 to end the war, which Tel Aviv has repeatedly violated.
The rockets also came in response to the Israeli-US war on Iran.
Hezbollah said the ban was not justified. “We understand the Lebanese government’s impotence in the face of the brutal Zionist enemy, which violates national sovereignty, occupies land, and poses a continuous threat to the country’s security and stability,” the group said, adding that it is the government’s right “to decide on war and peace”.
“However, given this clear weakness and deficiency, we see no justification for Prime Minister Salam and his government to take such aggressive measures against the Lebanese who reject the occupation,” it said on Monday.
