Jerusalem:
Israel fought on multiple fronts and intensified its battle with Lebanese Hezbollah on Monday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to pressure the “sacred mission” against Israel’s enemies on the first anniversary of the deadliest attack in Israeli history.
Hamas said it would be a long fight, but Netanyahu said both wars would ensure that the violence Israel suffered on October 7 could never be repeated.
The Israeli military said its air defenses intercepted a missile fired from Yemen, while Palestinian officials in the West Bank reported a deadly Israeli attack.
Tehran, which arms and finances Hezbollah and backs Yemeni rebels, cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as Iran awaits what Israel said will be retaliation for an Iranian rocket fire into Israel last week.
“As long as the enemy threatens our existence and the peace of our country, we will continue to fight. As long as our hostages are still in Gaza, we will continue to fight,” Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded televised address. not to give up the ‘sacred mission’ of achieving the war’s goals.
Pope Francis condemned the “shameful inability” of world powers to end the conflict in the Middle East, and European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the region was “on the brink of a complete fire.”
Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said the movement chooses to “continue the struggle in a long war of attrition, a war that is painful and costly for the enemy.”
He also said that dozens of people taken hostage in Gaza on October 7 were in a “very difficult” situation.
– Thousands of militants killed –
A senior Hamas official has acknowledged that “several thousand fighters from the movement and other resistance groups have been killed in the fighting.”
When the war in Gaza began, Netanyahu vowed to “crush” Hamas, but troops once again returned to areas to combat signals the movement was trying to rebuild.
Netanyahu has vowed to bring the hostages home, but critics in Israel have accused him of obstructing mediation for a ceasefire and the release of hostages.
Late last month, Israel turned its focus north on Hezbollah, with intensified airstrikes in Lebanon and ‘targeted’ ground attacks since last week.
Netanyahu says the goal is to ensure that tens of thousands of Israelis forced to flee Hezbollah’s fire can return home safely.
On Monday, the army said it would expand its operations against Hezbollah to the Lebanese coast south of the Al-Awali River, and warned people to stay away.
It also declared a “closed military zone” near the coast in Israel’s far northwest, near Shlomi, following a similar declaration last week in the northeast in the Metula area.
The military said Hezbollah fired about 135 projectiles into Israel on Monday and that Israeli forces retaliated by attacking “more than 120 terrorist targets in southern Lebanon within an hour.”
Late on Monday, Lebanese state media reported more Israeli attacks on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut, which came under repeated bombardment even after a bombardment killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
– More troops deployed –
Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli soldiers in two border villages in southern Lebanon, including Maroun al-Ras, where it has reported previous clashes. The army said it had deployed another division for operations across the border.
At least four projectiles were fired from Gaza soon after commemorations began on October 7, the Israeli army said, adding that it was retaliating against militant infrastructure across Gaza.
Hamas said it had fired rockets near the Gaza border and at Tel Aviv, while Hezbollah twice said it had fired rockets at areas north of Haifa, a major coastal city.
As troops fought what Israel says is a war for its existence, vigils at massacre sites and rallies called for the return of the hostages a year after their abduction.
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Late Monday in Tel Aviv, musicians performed as images of the victims flashed on the screens at a ceremony attended by families and relatives of the murdered and abducted people.
“We know in our minds, our hearts, in every cell of our bodies: there will be no rehabilitation without the return of the hostages. All of them,” said Nitza Corngold, whose son Tal Shoham was arrested.
The day began with President Isaac Herzog initiating a moment of silence at 6:29 a.m. — the time the attack began — in Reim, a kibbutz community where Hamas fighters killed at least 370 people at the Nova music festival, the day’s deadliest attack .
It started when Hamas fired thousands of rockets at nearby Israeli communities.
At the same time, militants stormed across Gaza’s fortified border and attacked nearly fifty different locations, including kibbutz communities and army bases.
Militants went door to door and shot residents.
– Gaza’s ‘graveyard’ –
Hours later, Israel launched a military offensive that has left parts of Gaza in ruins and displaced nearly all of its 2.4 million residents at least once amid an unrelenting humanitarian crisis.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Monday that the war had turned Gaza into a “graveyard”.
Of the 251 people taken hostage in Gaza, 97 are still being held, including 34 who the Israeli military says are dead.
According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, 41,909 people, the majority of them civilians, have been killed there since the start of the war. The figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.
More than 1,110 people have been killed and more than a million displaced since Israel’s escalation in Lebanon began in late September, official figures show.
Violence has also surged in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where more than 700 people have been killed since the Hamas attack, including two on Monday in Israeli raids, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The Israeli army says 349 soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive in Gaza began on October 27.
The people of Gaza just want the war to end.
“I grew old watching my children hungry, scared, having nightmares and screaming day and night from the sound of bombings and shells,” said a displaced woman, Israa Abu Matar, 26.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)