Key Points
- Israeli warplanes have carried out an intense bombardment of Lebanon and Hezbollah have fired rockets into Israel.
- The attacks came after an Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed 45 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
- The United Nations special coordinator in Lebanon says "no military solution" will make either side safer.
Israel and Hezbollah threatened to escalate their cross-border attacks despite a chorus of international calls for both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday after intense rocket fire from Lebanon that Israel has dealt "a series of blows on that it could have never imagined".
A defiant Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem said the Lebanese militant group was in a "new phase" in its battle against Israel.
Both spoke after attacks on northern Israel sent hundreds of thousands of people to bomb shelters and caused damage in the Haifa area.
"No country can tolerate attacks on its citizens," Netanyahu said nearly a year into the war in Gaza sparked by Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel that has also drawn in Iran-backed groups across the region, including Hezbollah.
Israeli army chief Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi vowed to "hit anyone who threatens" Israelis in a video statement.
Israel's key ally, the United States, said military escalation is not in Israel's "best interest", with President Joe Biden saying Washington was doing everything possible to prevent a wider conflagration.
Biden said his administration was "going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out. And we're still pushing hard".
Ahead of the annual General Assembly, UN chief António Guterres warned of the risk of Lebanon becoming "another Gaza" and said it was "clear that both sides are not interested in a ceasefire" in the Hamas-Israel war.
Hezbollah rocket fire reached Kiryat Bialik near north Israel's largest city Haifa, leaving a building in flames, another damaged by shrapnel, and vehicles destroyed
Iraqi Coalition claims attacks on Israel
The attacks have stoked fears the conflicts in Lebanon, and Gaza could spiral into the rest of the region.
An official in the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a grouping of Iran-backed armed factions, said they launched cruise missile and explosive drone attacks at Israel at dawn on Sunday as part of "a new phase in our support front" with Lebanon.
"Escalation in Lebanon means escalation from Iraq," the official said.
The United Nations special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said in a post on X: "With the region on the brink of an imminent catastrophe, it cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer."
Israeli security forces examine a site hit by a rocket fired from Lebanon, in Kiryat Bialik, northern Israel, on Sunday. Source: AAP / Ariel Schalit/AP
Forty-five people were killed in that strike, the Lebanese health ministry said on Sunday. It marked the deadliest Israeli airstrike on Beirut since the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Hezbollah, a powerful Iran-backed group, said 16 members including senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among those killed on Friday.
Israel's army said it hit an underground gathering of Aqil and leaders of Hezbollah's elite Radwan forces, and had almost completely dismantled its military chain of command.
The attack on Beirut levelled a multi-storey residential building in the crowded suburb and damaged a nursery next door, a security source said.
Three children were among those killed, according to Lebanon's health ministry.
That strike sharply escalated the conflict after
two days of attacks in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploded in Lebanon
.The death toll in those attacks, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, has risen to 39 with more than 3,000 injured.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.
With at least 84 people killed in Lebanon over the past week, the conflict toll in the country since October last year has surpassed 750.
Hezbollah has said it would keep fighting Israel until it agrees to a ceasefire with Hamas.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people during the group's October 7 attack on Israel, taking around 250 hostages.
The Israeli military's retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed more than 41,300 people, according to the enclave's health ministry.
US officials say a ceasefire agreement is unlikely anytime soon.
Israel wants Hezbollah to cease fire and withdraw forces from the border region, adhering to a United Nations resolution signed with Israel in 2006, irrespective of any Gaza deal.
On Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog told Sky News in the UK that Israel did not want war with Lebanon but said the country had been "hijacked" by Hezbollah.
