The Israeli military killed “the terrorist Farouk Amin Alasi, the Hezbollah commander of the Khiam area,” it said on Sunday as fighting continues in southern Lebanon.
“Alasi was responsible for the execution of many anti-tank missile and rocket attacks toward Israeli communities in the Galilee Panhandle, and especially Metula,” the tweet said.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also eliminated “the terrorist Yousef Ahmad Nun, a Radwan Forces company commander in the Khiam area who was responsible for rocket and anti-tank missile attacks toward Israeli communities in the Galilee area and IDF troops operating in the area,” the military said.
Hezbollah has not yet commented on the two men said to have been killed. Khiam, close to the border with Israel, is the site of ongoing fighting between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
The IDF also “eliminated Radwan forces and other Hezbollah terrorists through air strikes and close combat,” it said in a statement that added soldiers also found large stocks of Hezbollah weapons.
Lebanon: Fighting continues for villages in the south
Fighting between Israeli ground troops and fighters for the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia is continuing in several villages in the south of Lebanon.
Soldiers tried to enter the villages of Marun al-Ras and Jarun, the state news agency NNA reported on Sunday. There had already been reports of widespread destruction in these villages during the Israeli ground offensive.
Israeli forces bombarded the strategically important town of Khiam with artillery, NNA reported.
The newspaper L’Orient Le Jour reported, citing the Lebanese Red Cross, that 20 people posted missing in Khiam had now been confirmed dead. The television station LBCI reported that a hospital in Bint Jubayl had been damaged in an Israeli air raid.
Hezbollah continued its shelling of Israel and announced that it had attacked several Israeli towns with rockets. The information cannot be independently verified at this time.
UN: Humanitarian situation in Lebanon worse than 2006 war
The United Nations says the humanitarian situation in Lebanon is now even worse than during the last war against Israel 18 years ago.
“The humanitarian situation in Lebanon has reached levels that exceed the severity of the 2006 war,” the UN emergency aid office OCHA said on Sunday.
“The situation has escalated anew in recent days, with the Israeli army issuing displacement orders for residents of Baalbek and Nabatieh, shortly before airstrikes targeted these locations.”
The office said the toll on the population has been “exacerbated by the destruction of critical infrastructure including healthcare, with many hospitals overwhelmed and reportedly urgently requesting blood donations to address the critical influx of casualties.”
The current war between Israel and Hezbollah began on October 8 last year with rocket attacks by the Lebanese Shiite militia in support of the Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, which had launched the Gaza war with its terrorist attack on Israel the previous day.
Almost 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since then and a further 13,300 injured, according to official reports. The Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilians and members of Hezbollah in its lists.
Among the dead are also about 180 minors and 600 women. In its latest report, OCHA emphasized that more than 11,000 pregnant women have been affected by the war, including 1,300 who had to give birth in a health system on the verge of collapse.
The Humanitarian Coordinator for Lebanon, Imran Riza, condemned attacks on civilians and infrastructure, calling for “an immediate cessation of hostilities to protect vulnerable populations.”
