Israel fights Hezbollah in Lebanon, vows to respond to Iran’s missiles : NPR

Israeli troops battled Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and fended off their rockets into Israel, even as Israel carried out airstrikes in Gaza and vowed to respond after Iran’s large missile attack on Israel on Tuesday night.

The Israeli military said eight of its soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, in its first reports of close combat losses against the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since Israel launched its ground offensive there late Monday. Several more were wounded, some critically, the military said.

Israel says it aims to push Hezbollah away from the border so that tens of thousands of Israelis who have fled the group’s rocket fire can return safely to their homes in northern Israel.

The United Nations has decried the toll it’s taken on civilians. Israeli airstrikes and military action in Lebanon have killed more than 1,000 people, including dozens of children, and wounded several thousand in the past 10 days, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. And the U.N. human rights office says the violence has displaced more than 1 million people in Lebanon.

As the fighting mounted and fears grew of a wider war, the United Nations Security Council met in New York, where officials from Israel and Iran warned each other against further attacks.

All these developments came within days of the one-year mark since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people in Israel, setting off Israel’s expanding military campaigns on multiple fronts.

Health officials in Gaza told NPR at least 115 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours. Israel’s yearlong military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Israel vows to respond to Iran’s missile strike

Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles toward Israel late Tuesday. The Israeli military said most were intercepted, with help from the U.S., but there were several hits.

There was one confirmed death from the Iranian attack: a 38-year-old Palestinian man in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian civil defense.

Israel and the U.S. both have downplayed the impact of the strikes. But analysts say Tuesday’s attacks appeared to have caused more damage inside Israel than an Iranian attack in April, which was almost completely neutralized by Israeli and U.S. air defenses.

Officials in Jordan reported there were some minor injuries when shrapnel fell in the country, a U.S. ally, located between Israel and Iran.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said late Tuesday that the missile attack was in response to several recent killings, including the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah late Friday in Beirut; the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran in July in a strike widely assumed to be carried out by Israel; and an Iranian commander. Iran’s mission at the United Nations said the attack was a “legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime.”

Israel has promised a strong response to the missile strikes.

“This evening, Iran made a big mistake — and it will pay for it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said hours after the attack.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said “the consequences Iran will face for their actions will be far greater than they could ever have imagined.”

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urged swift action targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure: “We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime,” he wrote on the social platform X.

The United States, Israel’s top backer, is discussing new sanctions against Iran, the White House said. But President Biden told reporters he would not support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

“We’ll be discussing with the Israelis what they’re going to do,” Biden said. Referring to a call with the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, he added, “all seven of us agree that they [Israel] have a right to respond but they should respond in proportion.”

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was also reluctant to back the possibility of Israeli strikes on Iranian oil refineries.

Israel became angry at U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for speaking out against “the broadening of the Middle East conflict with escalation after escalation,” but failing to directly condemn Iran. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared Guterres was “persona non grata” and banned him from entering Israel.

The State Department’s Miller said, “Steps like these are not productive to [Israel] improving its standing in the world.”

On Wednesday, Guterres defended his statements as he addressed the Security Council.

“As I did in relation to the Iranian attack in April — and as should have been obvious yesterday in the context of the condemnation I expressed — I again strongly condemn yesterday’s massive missile attack by Iran on Israel,” he said.

Kat Lonsdorf contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel. Michele Kelemen contributed reporting from Washington, D.C. And Aya Batrawy contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.