BEIRUT: Urgent calls for foreign nationals to leave Lebanon increased on Sunday with France warning of “a very volatile” situation as Iran and its allies prepare their response to high-profile killings blamed on Israel.
Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which has traded near-daily fire with Israeli forces since the Gaza war broke out in October, said its soldiers had fired a barrage of rockets at northern Israel overnight.
The Israeli military said 30 projectiles were fired from Lebanon, and most of them were intercepted.
With Israel on high alert in anticipation of major military action by Tehran-affiliated armed groups including Hezbollah and Hamas, medics and police said two people were killed Sunday in a stabbing attack in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The attacker, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, was “neutralized” by the police and taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Israeli forces, meanwhile, continued to bombard the Gaza Strip, witnesses and officials in the besieged Hamas-ruled territory said, with no end in sight to the nearly 10-month-long Israeli assault on Gaza.
France, Canada and Jordan were among the latest governments to call on their citizens to leave Lebanon.
“In a very volatile security context, French citizens were asked 'urgently' to avoid traveling to Lebanon, and those already in the country 'to make their arrangements now to leave … as soon as possible,'” the foreign ministry in Paris said.
The US and UK have issued similar warnings.
Several Western airlines have canceled flights to the region.
On Sunday, Qatar Airways said that “in light of recent developments in Lebanon” the Doha-Beirut route will “only operate during daylight hours” at least until Monday.
The killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday, hours after the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah's military chief in Beirut, has sparked vows of revenge from Iran and the so-called “axis of resistance” of Tehran-backed armed groups.
Israel, accused by Hamas, Iran and others of carrying out the attack that killed Haniyeh, has not directly commented.
Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip has killed at least 39,550 people, according to the territory's health ministry.
Haniyeh, Hamas's political chief, was the group's lead negotiator in efforts to end the war.
His killing raised questions about the continued viability of efforts by Qatari, Egyptian and American mediators to broker a ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners.
On the ground in Gaza, fighting continued on Sunday.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said eight bodies had been recovered from a residential building in northern Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli airstrike.
Doctors at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza said at least five people were killed and 16 wounded in an Israeli drone attack on tents housing displaced Palestinians in the medical complex, with a separate attack on a house nearby in the same area killing three.
On Saturday, an Israeli attack on a school turned into a shelter killed at least 17 people, the civil defense agency said. Israel claims the facility was used by militants.
An AFP correspondent reported Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling early Sunday in and around Gaza City, while witnesses said there was more shelling, gunfire and at least two airstrikes in the area's southern territory.
The Israeli military said its air force had struck “approximately 50 terror targets across the entire Gaza Strip” in the past 24 hours.
Israel's ally the United States said it would move warships and fighter jets to the region to protect American personnel and defend Israel.
Analysts have told AFP that a joint but measured action by Iran and its allies was likely, while Tehran said it expects Hezbollah to strike deeper into Israel and no longer be limited to military targets.
US President Joe Biden, asked by reporters if he thought Iran would back down, said: “I hope so. I don't know.”
On Sunday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi will visit Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart, his ministry said.
The killing of Haniyeh “has brought the Middle East to its moment of greatest danger in years,” the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank said in a report published on Saturday.
“The risk of a spiraling conflagration is high,” with the risk of a miscalculation that would trigger an all-out war… likely greater now than it was in April,” it added.
On April 13, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israeli soil, firing a barrage of drones and missiles — most of which were intercepted — after an attack killed Revolutionary Guards at Tehran's consulate in Damascus.
The ICG said securing “a long-overdue ceasefire” in Gaza was “the best way to meaningfully reduce tensions in the region.”
Hamas officials but also some analysts and protesters in Israel have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war to protect his ruling hard-right coalition.
On Sunday, Netanyahu told his cabinet that he was “doing everything” to return the hostages and was prepared “to go to great lengths” to do so.
