Israeli strikes intensified across southern Lebanon on Tuesday after Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to speed up its offensive and “crush” Hezbollah. The escalation came as residents fled the southern suburbs of Beirut and fresh attacks hit towns, villages and the Bekaa valley.
Netanyahu said in a video posted to his Telegram channel that he had ordered “an even greater acceleration of our operations.” He said Israel would “intensify our blows, increase our firepower, and we will crush them,” adding that Israeli teams were working on countermeasures against drone attacks, including fibre-optic drones. In Israel, Bezalel Smotrich said there was “an urgent need to put an end to the threat posed by Hezbollah’s explosive drones.”
The latest escalation follows a conflict that erupted on 2 March and a ceasefire that took effect on 17 April, though both sides have kept exchanging fire almost daily since then. Hezbollah said on Monday it launched several attacks on three barracks and a military post in northern Israel in response to what it called Israel’s violation of the truce, while saying it had carried out at least four drone attacks. The fighting has remained locked in a pattern of retaliation that neither side has been willing to stop.
On Monday evening, the Israeli air force carried out successive strikes in the Bekaa valley in eastern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Earlier in the day, dozens of Israeli strikes targeted several towns and villages in southern Lebanon, killing three people in two cars and on a motorcycle, the agency said. Israeli airstrikes also hit several towns near Tyre after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 villages.
The Israeli military said on Monday that one soldier had been killed the previous day in southern Lebanon, bringing the total number of Israeli soldiers killed since the outbreak of hostilities with Hezbollah to 23. One civilian contractor has also been killed. Lebanese authorities say Israeli strikes since early March have killed more than 3,100 people, a toll that underscores how far the war has moved beyond border exchanges.
The ceasefire has never fully held, and the current round of strikes suggests the gap between declared restraint and battlefield reality is widening again. For families on both sides of the frontier, and for political leaders in Tel Aviv and Beirut, the question is no longer whether the truce is fraying, but how much more force will be unleashed before anyone tries to restore it.
