Terrified Lebanese citizens look up to the skies fearing ‘nowhere is safe’ from airstrikes as Israel ‘warns US it is planning limited ground invasion that could start imminently’

Terrified citizens displaced by bitter fighting fear there is no safe place left in Lebanon, with as many as one million people driven from their homes, according to the country’s prime minister.

Israel’s latest aerial campaign has killed more than 1,000 people, with at least 100,000 crossing over into war-torn Syria to avoid the bombardment, with makeshift shelters in the capital desperately overcrowded, according to the UNHCR.

Israel has vowed to continue to fight with Hezbollah after ‘eliminating’ its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and other leading senior officials, in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday, and is now gesturing towards a ground invasion.

A U.S. official said on Monday that Israel had already warned Washington that a limited ground operation to clear out Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon could start imminently, according to the Washington Post.

Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, met with troops near the Lebanese border , insisting Israel would ‘use all the abilities we have’ to ensure the return of some 60,000 Israelis displaced from the north by nearly a year of border clashes. 

He added that ‘everything that needs to be done – will be done’ and that ‘we will use all the forces from the air, sea and land’. 

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile issued a stark warning to the Iranian regime, now threatening retaliation for the attacks on Hezbollah, claiming ‘there is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach’.

He addressed Iranian citizens directly in an address shared on social media, saying that ‘the people of Iran should know that Israel stands with you’ and that Iran will be ‘finally free… a lot sooner than people think’.

Netanyahu added that ‘the terror network that the [Iranian] regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled’ today, after Iran vowed revenge for Israel’s killing of Nasrallah and other top officials, including Iran’s top regional commander, on Saturday.

Hezbollah is still reeling from the attack on its Beirut headquarters on Friday, but warned Israel today that it is braced and ‘ready’ for war – as Israeli forces appear to be edging closer to a ground invasion.

Israeli special forces are already carrying out raids in Lebanon ahead of an imminent incursion aimed at ousting Hezbollah, officials claimed today.

Elite commandos were said to be targeting the Iran-backed group’s infrastructure, including weapon sites and control centres, as it scrambles to recover from the loss of long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah.

‘They are targeting key sites which have been built across the border zone,’ an Israeli official told The Telegraph.

IDF tanks have massed on the northern border ahead of an anticipated incursion into Lebanon despite resounding pressure from Israel’s allies to de-escalate at once as they fear a collapse into all-out war.

Lebanon is also reported to be sending its army to the southern border. Israel maintains that its war is with Hezbollah, not the people of Lebanon, as it prepares to move north.

France and the US have so far led efforts to de-escalate, proposing a 21-day-ceasefire that was initially rebuffed by Israel.

American officials said today that they believed they had persuaded Israel not to conduct a ground invasion, however, following intense talks over the weekend.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the New York Times they believed Israel was only planning smaller, targeted incursions into southern Lebanon.

Incursions by special forces were said to be aimed at displacing Hezbollah from strategic fighting positions used to fire rockets into northern Israel. 

Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel since the war in Gaza broke out last October, in response to the Israeli bombing of the Strip.

But with some 60,000 Israelis displaced from their homes and jobs in northern Israel by the attacks, Israel has vowed to vanquish Hezbollah from southern Lebanon.

An Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s Beirut headquarters on Friday left the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dead, the IDF and Hezbollah confirmed Saturday.

As Hezbollah scrambles to appoint a new leader and vows retaliation, allies have been urging a ceasefire deal to stop the conflict from breaking out into a wider regional war.

Still, Israel looks to capitalise on its momentum, having taken out dozens of officials linked to Hezbollah – and Hamas and Iran – in a week of intensive strikes. 

Hamas today announced that its leader in Lebanon had been killed by Israeli air strikes.

Fateh Sherif Abu al-Amine died today in a strike on the Al-Buss refugee camp in the southern city of Tyre – days after Hezbollah’s long-standing chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut.

The group said al-Amine was killed with his wife, son and daughter in what it called a ‘terrorist and criminal assassination’.

That statement came hours after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular left-wing group, said three of its members were killed in a strike on Beirut’s Kola district early today. 

Most of Israel’s attacks against Hezbollah have so far been carried out in the south of Lebanon or Beirut’s southern suburbs.

But this morning’s attack in the Kola district was the first within Beirut’s city limits – another escalation that observers fear could could trigger a wider war, dragging in Iran and the United States. 

Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem assured that the group was nonetheless ready for any Israeli ground invasion, warning that the battle could last a long time.

Qassem said Hezbollah would continue ‘confronting the Israeli enemy in support of Gaza and Palestine, in defence of Lebanon and its people, and in response to the assassinations and the killing of civilians’.

‘We will face any scenario and we are ready if Israel decides to enter by land, the resistance forces are ready for any ground confrontation.

‘We know the battle may be long,’ he added on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel, in the first address by a senior Hezbollah leader since Nasrallah’s death.

In the televised address, he added that Hezbollah would choose a new chief ‘at the earliest opportunity’ with an existing mechanism. 

‘Be assured that the choices will be easy because they are clear and we are united,’ Qassem added, without saying when the selection would take place, or when Nasrallah’s funeral would be held.

While Qassem automatically takes over the Hezbollah leadership after Nasrallah’s death, the group’s decision-making Shura Council must meet to elect a new secretary-general.

Hashem Safieddine, head of Hezbollah’s executive council, has been pegged as a possible replacement for Nasrallah – though nothing has yet been confirmed.

Safieddine oversees the group’s political affairs and sits on the Jihad Council, managing the group’s military operations.

He is also a cousin of the late leader Hassan Nasrallah and, like him, is a cleric who wears to black turban to denote descent from the Prophet Mohammed. 

But the choice is not clear-cut. 

Edmund Fitton-Brown, Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project and former Ambassador of the UK to Yemen, told MailOnline: ‘If you look at the Hezbollah leadership roll call, they are mainly dead, many of them in the past week or so.

‘It’s not clear to me whether there is an heir apparent. And would they want primarily a fighter or a political or religious leader?’ 

As the conflict rages on unabated, the US and other members of the international community this weekend issued an 11th-hour appeal for restraint.

President Joe Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that an all-out war in the Middle East must be avoided, even as the US military ramps up its presence in the region. 

More than 1,030 people – including 156 women and 87 children – have been killed in less than two weeks, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, since Israel stepped up its  attacks on Hezbollah.

The airstrike in the Kola district hit a multistory residential building and caused massive damage.

Shocking pictures and videos showed ambulances and fire crews gathered outside the building as flames raged inside. 

Israel has repeatedly targeted both Hezbollah and Hamas officials in Lebanon since the Gaza war erupted almost a year ago.

A strike in January, which a US defence official said was carried out by Israel, killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri and six other militants in Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold.

In August, an Israeli strike on a vehicle in the south Lebanon city of Sidon killed Hamas commander Samer al-Hajj.

Lebanon’s official Palestinian refugee camps were created for Palestinians who were driven out or fled during the 1948 war at the time of Israel’s creation.

By longstanding convention, the Lebanese army stays out of the camps and leaves the Palestinian factions to handle security.

The latest developments come as Israel also launched a fresh wave of air strikes against Houthi ­targets in Yemen.

The Houthis launched a ballistic missile attack toward Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Saturday when Netanyahu was arriving, prompting Israel to retaliate with its own attacks. 

The IDF said it targeted power plants and sea port facilities in the city of Hodeida, with pictures circulating on social media showing huge explosions.

Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry said the strikes killed four people and wounded 40 others, but the rebels claimed they took precautionary measures ahead of the strikes, emptying oil stored in the ports, according to Nasruddin Ammer, deputy director of the Houthi media office. 

He said in a post on X that the strikes won’t stop the rebels’ attacks on shipping routes and on Israel.

Mr Fitton Brown, as former ambassador for the UK to Yemen, told MailOnline: ‘Hamas and other Palestinian groups have their hands full. Also, they were sore that Hezbollah hadn’t gone all in with them against Israel.

‘But the Iraqis and Houthis will want to make some noise. More projectiles fired at Israel are possible – and Red Sea activity.’ 

The Israel-Hamas war has escalated in recent days after the IDF said it had wiped out Hezbollah’s top brass in the airstrike on southern Beirut that killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Israeli troops and tanks were last night seen gathering in the north, on their border with southern Lebanon, in apparent preparation for a ground invasion. 

The last time Israel launched a ground offensive of Lebanon was in 2006, when 34 days of intense cross-border fighting with Hezbollah ended in a stalemate.

Israel claimed that more than 20 senior Hezbollah members including Ali Karaki – who was in charge of the southern front – were assassinated in the attack on Friday alongside Nasrallah.

Reuters reported Nasrallah’s body was found yesterday, and videos circulating on social media purport to show his body being retrieved.

Hezbollah – the Iran-backed terror group in Lebanon – confirmed on Saturday that Nasrallah, who led it for 32 years, was killed in Friday’s strike. 

Several foreign embassies have now begun to evacuate non-essential staff as the country braces for the possibility of an all-out war.

Continued airstrikes in Lebanon killed at least 100 people on Sunday, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Workers at the marina told the Mail that staff from the Saudi Arabia embassy had departed from Lebanon by boat on Saturday evening. It was unclear whether the ambassador was among the group.

Last night Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said: ‘Our message is clear – for us, no place is too far.’

Yesterday dozens of Israeli warplanes bombarded several Houthi targets in Yemen, according to Israel’s military spokesman. 

They destroyed power plants and the nearby Ras Isa port which the IDF claims is used by the terror group to transfer ‘Iranian weapons to the region’. 

The Al-Mayadeen network reported more than 10 air strikes were carried out on oil tankers in the area as revenge for missile attacks which had been fired into Israel by the Houthi Rebels.

Yemen’s Houthis have repeatedly fired missiles and drones at Israel since October 7 in what they say are solidarity attacks for Palestine. 

They have also hijacked commercial ships in the Red sea including British vessels.

Israeli forces also said they struck Hezbollah targets across Lebanon. 

A civil defence worker who survived a ‘precise strike’ in Dahiyeh, southern Beirut, said he received a last-minute warning shortly before a missile hit a neighbouring building. 

Speaking to our reporter, he said: ‘I barely made it. I got a message to evacuate and four minutes later there was a strike’.

Yesterday Pope Francis said that the airstrikes in Lebanon go ‘beyond morality’. It comes as British families fled to Beirut airport, with the Government last night once again urging British nationals to leave Lebanon.

Iran has vowed revenge for the death of an Iranian general killed alongside Nasrallah on Friday. Abbas Araghchi, Iranian foreign minister, said the killing of Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan ‘will not go unanswered’. 

A ‘barrage of rockets’ was launched at northern Israel yesterday afternoon causing red alert sirens to ring out in the Tiberias region.

Since October last year Hezbollah has been firing thousands of missiles at Israeli towns and villages which has led to the semi-permanent displacement of more than 60,000 people.

Tragically 12 children were killed in July by a Hezbollah rocket fired from Lebanon which exploded on a football field in Israel. 

Up to 1million Lebanese people have now also been displaced from their homes as a result of the fighting, according to Najid Mikati, the Lebanese prime minister.

He said: ‘It is the largest displacement movement that may have happened.’ 

Mr Netanyahu has vowed to return the 60,000 displaced Israeli citizens to their homes along the Lebanese border. 

IDF tanks continue to gather on the country’s northern border in preparation for a possible incursion into southern Lebanon.

This week, Herzi Halevi, Israel’s chief of the general staff, told troops that the fierce aerial bombardment was to ‘prepare the ground for your possible entry’.

And on Wednesday Yoav Gallant oversaw a rehearsal of an incursion, telling soldiers: ‘The moment may come when we give an order.’

The last time Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon was in 2006, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israeli border towns. 

However, the Shia militia has faced almost two weeks of intense bombing that has obliterated Lebanese towns along the border.

‘We let them build up again on our border after 2006 and that was a mistake’, 39-year-old Yuval, a British citizen and reservist infantryman, whose parents moved to Israel in the 1970s, told The Times.

Yuval, who has spent four months fighting with the IDF in Gaza, added: ‘Now there’s not a chance in hell we’ll let them sit on our border. I understand the world doesn’t like conflict. But whether it’s with airstrikes or a ground invasion, we need to move them.’

He added: ‘The soldiers are ready, the tanks are ready. We know they are waiting for us … I’m tired, but we’re here because it’s important.’ 

Energised by the death of Hezbollah’s leader, 28-year-old reservist engineer Yehuda told the newspaper: ‘We must do what we must do.’

As Israel launch attacks on Lebanon and Yemen, the Houthi-run health ministry said at least four people were killed and 29 wounded in airstrikes on Yemen’s port of Hodeidah, which Israel said were a response to Houthi missile attacks. 

In Lebanon, authorities said at least 105 people had been killed by Israeli air strikes on Sunday.

On Monday, an Israeli air airstrike hit an upper floor of an apartment building in the Kola district of Beirut, with firefighters seen tackling a blaze. 

Lebanon’s Health Ministry has said more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without saying how many were civilians. The government said a million people – a fifth of the population – have fled their homes. 

Israeli drones hovered over Beirut for much of Sunday, with the loud blasts of new airstrikes echoing around the Lebanese capital. 

Displaced families spent the night on benches at Zaitunay Bay, a string of restaurants and cafes on Beirut’s waterfront.

Many of Israel’s attacks have been carried out in the south of Lebanon, where the Iran-backed Hezbollah has most of its operations, or Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The United States has urged a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Lebanon but has also authorised its military to reinforce in the region.

President Joe Biden, asked if an all-out war in the Middle East could be avoided, said ‘It has to be.’ He said he will be talking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Meanwhile John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, warned Netanyahu that he risked a wider regional war by sending his soldiers into Lebanon.

‘An all-out war with Hezbollah, certainly with Iran, is not the way to do that. If you want to get those folks back home safely and sustainably, we believe that a diplomatic path is the right course,’ he told CNN. 

Following the assassination of Nasrallah,  Safieddine is expected to take over as the leader of Hezbollah.

Safieddine, his maternal cousin, is also a cleric who wears the black turban denoting descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, and has long been tipped as his successor.

It’s believed he was born in southern Lebanon and is in his late 50s or early 60s. As young men they studied theology together at Shia institutions in Iraq and Iran. 

Safieddine joined Hezbollah soon after it was set up during the Lebanese civil war – after Israel besieged the capital Beirut in 1982.

He heads Hezbollah’s political affairs and is a member of the Jihad Council, which manages the group’s military operations. The US and Saudi Arabia class Safieddine as a terrorist. 

He made headlines in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when he confirmed Hezbollah’s support for the group. ‘Our history and guns and our rockets are with you,’ Safieddine said.

Fears of a ground invasion came as Syrians and Iranians celebrated following Nasrallah’s death in Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Friday.

There were jubilant scenes in the northern Syrian city of Idlib, where people took to the streets honking horns, handing out sweets and thanking Israelis.

Anti-Iranian regime demonstrators also gathered outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, west London, to welcome Nasrallah’s assassination.

In contrast to the scenes of joy outside the Israeli embassy in London, Iran’s embassy to the UK in the capital has lowered its flag to half-mast following Nasrallah’s death.

The move came as Iran began five days of official national mourning, announced by the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Kaouk had been thought to be among the main contenders to replace Nasrallah, who had led Hezbollah for 32 years.

The Lebanese group’s role supporting both the Iranian and Syrian ruling regimes helps explain why many opponents of both have welcomed Nasrallah’s demise.

Iran helped establish Hezbollah in the 1980s and has provided the Lebanese militant group with sophisticated weaponry and training.

Hezbollah has also aided Syria’s President Bashir al-Assad in his crackdown on rebels in that country’s civil war which has been raging since 2011. 

Syria’s government condemned Nasrallah’s killing in Friday’s strikes, in contrast to the jubilant response in rebel-held Idlib where people waved Syrian flags, cheered and handed out treats.

One person wrote on X, formerly Twitter: ‘I’m in Idlib right now and the Syrians are out on the streets celebrating rumours of the death of Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, aka Hezboshaytan!

‘Just a few days ago Hezboshaytan bombed a village here, today we buried a one-year-old baby and his mother that were killed.’

Another video posted on social media showed women in Iran, covering their faces, welcoming the news of Nasrallah’s death.

A speaker said: ‘The children of Iran send a congratulatory message to everyone for the death of Hassan Nasrallah and congratulate the Iranian nation.’