DUBAI/BEIRUT: The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned Israel on Thursday against attacking the Islamic Republic in retaliation for a missile barrage, as the Israeli military stepped up its offensive in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Fears of a wider Middle East conflict have grown as Israel plans its response to the Oct. 1 missile attack carried out by Iran after Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah.
“We tell you (Israel) that if you commit any aggression against any point we will painfully attack the same point of yours,” Hossein Salami said in a televised speech, adding that Iran can penetrate Israel’s defences.
There has been speculation that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it has long threatened to do and other options include attacks on its vital oil sites.
Russia is warning Israel against any strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, state news agency TASS quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Thursday.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, on a Middle East tour, met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo, with Sisi reiterating Egypt’s call to avoid an expansion of the conflict, the Egyptian presidency said.
Iran warns of ‘decisive’ response if Israel strikes, urges UN action
However Israel shows no signs of easing its military campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and it has vowed to punish Iran for its attack.
In the north of Gaza on Thursday, Israeli strikes killed 19 Palestinians including children at a school in the Jabalia camp that is sheltering displaced people, Gaza health ministry official Medhat Abbas told Reuters.
Israel’s military said dozens of fighters were at the site and it conducted a precise strike on a meeting point for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group inside the compound.
Hamas denied it used the school.
Residents of Gaza, which has been reduced to rubble, are also suffering from a humanitarian crisis.
Gazans at risk of famine
The entire enclave remains at risk of famine and is experiencing emergency levels of hunger, with intense Israeli military operations adding to concerns and hampering humanitarian access, a global monitor said on Thursday.
UK sanctions Iranian military figures following attack on Israel
About 1.84 million people across the Palestinian territory are suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, including nearly 133,000 people experiencing the most severe, or “catastrophic”, levels, according to an analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
Israel struck Syria’s port city of Latakia early on Thursday, Syrian state media reported, and the United States said it carried out strikes on Wednesday in areas of Yemen controlled by Houthis.
Qatar, which has mediated in numerous failed ceasefire talks, said there had been no engagement with any parties for the last three to four weeks on the Gaza war.
On its northern front in Lebanon, Israel has said it will not stop fighting a now weakened Hezbollah before it can safely return its citizens to their homes near the Lebanese border and said any ceasefire negotiations will be held “under fire”.
The airstrikes have put Lebanese on edge.
Abdelnaser, a man displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold which Israel has repeatedly bombed, was on the waterfront early on Thursday morning.
He recalled Lebanon’s long list of tragedies over the years and seemed resigned to more uncertainty in a country that was once called the Switzerland of the Middle East before the 1975-1990 civil war.
“War has become normal for us. We know that every 10 years Lebanon gets built, and every 10 years it gets destroyed again,” he said.
Hezbollah member of parliament Hassan Fadlallah said the armed group would keep fighting, but he reiterated its leaders are carefully coordinating with Lebanon’s speaker of parliament in efforts to reach a ceasefire. Israeli soldiers have not managed to control any villages in south Lebanon, he added.
Israel says its ground operation has so far killed dozens of Hezbollah fighters and that its troops have seized thousands of weapons and destroyed the group’s bunkers and tunnel below southern Lebanon’s villages.
These were being used as staging grounds to launch an attack resembling Hamas’s devastating cross-border raid on Israel which sparked the Gaza war on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel added.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that over the past 24 hours it had killed 45 Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.
Israeli operations in Lebanon have killed at least 2,350 people over the last year, according to the health ministry, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced. The death toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the same period, according to Israel.