LONDON, June 27. /TASS/. Israel’s near-daily attacks against the Lebanon-based Shiite movement Hezbollah using white phosphorus, prohibited by international law, have laid waste to a 5km-wide zone along the border between Israel and Lebanon, The Financial Times (FT) reported, citing radar data and analysis of satellite imagery.
According to the newspaper, the attacks have mostly ravaged a 5km-wide strip of land just north of the so-called Blue Line, a border drawn between the two countries by the United Nations. Israeli attacks have badly damaged not only Hezbollah military facilities, but also civilian infrastructure, including buildings and farm lands. Some border villages and towns in southern Lebanon have been levelled, the newspaper said.
Damage from Israeli strikes has left a strip of land resembling "the buffer zone" that Israel is seeking to establish in Lebanon, the FT wrote. According to Hashem Haidar, the head of Lebanon’s Southern Council, more than 3,000 houses in the country’s south have been levelled, with another 12,000 incurring damage. The Israeli strikes have left reservoirs, electricity networks, solar panels and roads in disrepair, he added. "They [the IDF] are destroying the infrastructure, to make it impossible for you to return and live here," the newspaper quoted Aita al-Chaab Mayor Mohammad Srour as saying.
The situation in the Middle East sharply escalated following an incursion of Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip into Israel on October 7, accompanied by killings of residents of Israeli settlements near the border and taking hundreds hostage, including children, women and elderly people. Hamas cast the attack as a response to Israeli actions against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israel declared a complete siege of the Gaza Strip and started striking the enclave and parts of Lebanon and Syria. Afterward, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) started a ground operation in Gaza.
Tensions are not abating on Israel’s northern border, with regular shelling attacks coming from Lebanon and Israel striking back. According to the IDF, Israeli forces target Hezbollah sites. More than 80,000 Israelis have been evacuated from border areas.