Hezbollah 'enters battle of reckoning' with Israel

Hezbollah said yesterday it had entered an "open-ended battle of reckoning" with Israel after it launched a series of rocket attacks on the north of the country, as world powers implored both sides to step back from the brink of all-out war.

- Lorenzo Tondo, William Christou

In a significant escalation of the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group, Israeli warplanes carried out their most intense bombardment in almost a year of conflict across Lebanon's south, while Hezbollah responded with its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war.

The rise in tensions prompted a UN official to warn of "imminent catastrophe" in the region, while the UN secretary general, António Guterres, talked of the "possibility of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza".

During a funeral for a top Hezbollah commander who was killed on Friday along with 44 other people in an Israeli strike on Beirut's southern suburbs, the group's deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, said yesterday that an "open-ended battle of reckoning" had started. He added: "Threats will not stop us... We are ready to face all military possibilities."

As Israeli warplanes pounded border villages, and more than 100,000 residents fled northwards, politicians in Beirut called for a de-escalation to avoid a war. Authorities said four people had been killed and nine injured over the weekend.

But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was trenchant in his rhetoric.

"In the last few days, we have inflicted on Hezbollah a sequence of blows that it did not imagine. If Hezbollah did not understand the message, I promise you, it will understand the message," he said.

"No country can tolerate shooting at its residents, shooting at its cities - and we, the state of Israel, will not tolerate it either... We will do everything necessary to restore security."

The Israel Defense Forces said early yesterday that hundreds of rockets had been fired into Israel from Lebanon, with some landing near the northern city of Haifa.

The IDF said rockets had been fired "toward civilian areas", pointing to a possible escalation after previous barrages had mainly been aimed at military targets.