Middle East crisis live: Israel launches further strikes on southern Lebanon after missile fired at Tel Aviv intercepted | Lebanon

William Christou reports from Beirut for the Guardian

An airstrike targeted the town of Maysaara, a town in the mountains north of Beirut, the farthest north Israel has struck since the beginning of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah last year. The strike comes just a few hours after Hezbollah launched a missile which it claimed was targeting the Mossad in Tel Aviv, which Israel says it intercepted.

The strike on Maysaara, a little over 60 miles from the UN-drawn blue line that separates Israel and Lebanon, caused alarm in Lebanon. Many have looked at the mountains north of Beirut as a potential refuge in the case of a full-scale war with Israel, drawing on experience from the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel which left the area relatively untouched.

On Tuesday night, an airstrike carried out on Jiyeh, about 10 miles south of Beirut, was heard across the capital city and the surrounding mountainsides. Israeli media claimed a senior leader in the Palestinian militant organisation Islamic Jihad was the target of the strike, though the organisation did not confirm the claims.

Since the weekend, Israel’s intensified aerial campaign on Lebanon has re-defined which areas of Lebanon are “safe” from fighting, as strikes repeatedly hit Beirut and areas immediately south – a previous red-line over the last year.

Israel’s military has announced it is carrying out more strikes on southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

Nearly 560 people, including at least 50 children, have already been killed this week in Israel’s bombing campaign, which it says is targeting weapons and terrorist infrastructure used by Hezbollah. Thousands of people have been injured and tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.

More details soon …

Israel claims Hezbollah missile was heading towards civilian areas in Tel Aviv

Emma Graham-Harrison

IDF International Spokesperson, LTC Nadav Shoshani, said the attempt to hit Tel Aviv this morning was the first time Hezbollah has fired towards Tel Aviv, and the group had deployed a surface-to-surface heavy long range missile.

The missile, which was intercepted, was heading towards civilian areas of the city and Israel responded with an attack against the launcher, he told journalists.

Hezbollah said the attack targeted headquarters of the Mossad intelligence agency, but Shoshani said it was directed at a different part of the city.

“The Mossad headquarters is not in that area, it is a bit east and north of that area. Their missile triggered alerts in Netanya and Tel Aviv along the coastline,” Shoshani said.

“Hezbollah is definitely trying to escalate the situation”, he said, but added the country treats all attacks against its citizens as an equal threat, whether in Haifa or Tel Aviv. “Any fire towards Israel is something we do not accept, and we plan on acting to defend ourselves and remove the threat,” he said.

He said Israeli attacks “in recent weeks” had taken out a significant part of Hezbollah’s arsenal and its chain of command, so although the group were trying to increase the number and range of their attacks on Israel, their capacity to do so had been reduced.

Israel estimated that Hezbollah had 150,000 missiles at the start of the war. Shoshani, declined to say how many had been destroyed.

Israel has brought in tighter restrictions, which include school closures, in northern parts of the country, including the city of Haifa. Shoshani said there are now over a million Israelis under these restrictions. Although an initial estimate would be up to 1.3 million people, many are thought to have headed south to stay with friends and relatives, he added.

Hezbollah has confirmed that it fired a rocket targeting the Mossad’s headquarters outside Tel Aviv early Wednesday. Hezbollah has blamed the Mossad for carrying out last week’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, in which 42 people including children were killed and thousands injured.

Sirens had sounded in Tel Aviv early on Wednesday, sending residents to bomb shelters, though no casualties or damage was reported.

The Israeli military later said it had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile crossing from Lebanon.

Lebanon’s foreign minister has suggested the US is the only country that can end the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and expressed disappointment in President Joe Biden’s response so far. In remarks reported by Agence France Presse, Abdallah Bou Habib, said of Biden’s speech to the UN on Tuesday:

It was not strong, it is not promising, and it would not solve the Lebanese problem … We are still hoping. The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.

Making a valedictory address to the UN general assembly, the US president, Joe Biden, urged Israel against an all-out war, but blamed the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia for an unprovoked attack on Israel after 7 October and for continuing to strike Israel since.

Biden said the US was working tirelessly on a deal that would enable the populations on the Lebanese-Israeli border to return to their homes, but Iranian diplomats said they had been told through third parties that the US administration had admitted it was powerless to stop the Israeli bombardment.

Bou Habib also said that the number of displaced Lebanese, which had numbered about 110,000 since 7 October and before Israel’s latest offensive this week, was now probably “approaching half a million”.

Noting that Israel had also seen displacement in the northern areas, he said, “All for what?”

Bou Habib also said he was convinced that Iran did not want conflict.

“I don’t think they want to be involved in a war,” he said.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the conflict in the Middle East.

Israel has launched a series of fresh strikes on southern Lebanon, Lebanese media reported early Wednesday, the third consecutive day of a major Israeli assault on its northern neighbour in which hundreds of Lebanese have been killed.

“Since 5am enemy warplanes have launched strikes” on several areas of southern Lebanon, the official National News Agency reported, adding that there were unspecified casualties. Israel confirmed its attacks, saying it had targeted Hezbollah.

It also reported that “enemy warplanes and drones” had targeted multiple locations the Baalbek area in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley after midnight, also reporting casualties there. At least two dozen people were killed by Israeli attacks targeting the militant group Hezbollah on Lebanon on Tuesday, bringing the death toll since Monday, when Israel killed hundreds of people in strikes across the country, to 569, including at least 50 children.

In Israel, sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and the Israeli military said it had intercepted a missile crossing from Lebanon. No damage or casualties were reported.

On a trip to the US, the Lebanese foreign minister meanwhile voiced disappointment with US President Joe Biden’s response to the Israeli offensive, but nevertheless said only the US could bring an end to the conflict.

“It was not strong. It is not promising and it would not solve this problem,” Abdallah Bou Habib during a virtual event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to Biden’s speech at the United Nations earlier in the day.

“I [am] still hoping. The United States is the only country that can really make a difference in the Middle East and with regard to Lebanon.”

More on that soonest. In other developments:

• Thousands of Lebanese people fled the continuing bombing in the country’s south on Tuesday as Israel said it was conducting “extensive strikes” on Hezbollah targets, including on the southern suburbs of Beirut, for the second day in a row and third time this week. Israel carried out an airstrike in Jiyeh, a seaside town 20 kilometers south of Beirut late Tuesday night. The strong explosion was heard across Beirut and the surrounding mountains.

• Hezbollah confirmed that an Israeli attack in Dahieh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut, on Tuesday had killed Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi, also known as Abu Issa, the commander of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile division. Lebanon’s health ministry said in a statement that the “Israeli enemy raid on Ghobeiri in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed six people and injured 15”.

• The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to maintain the offensive against Hezbollah and said the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was leading Lebanon “to the edge of the abyss”. Israeli officials have said the recent rise in airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon is designed to force the group to agree to a diplomatic solution, cease its own attacks on Israel or unilaterally withdraw its forces from close to the contested border.

• Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said Israel was striving for its current military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon to be as short as possible. But in his briefing with reporters on Tuesday, he added that Israel is also prepared for the operation to take time. Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Hezbollah has suffered “extremely severe blows” and Israel has “more strikes ready”.

• Hezbollah said it had targeted several Israeli military targets including an explosives factory about 35 miles (56km) into Israel and the Megiddo airfield near the town of Afula, which it attacked three separate times. Officials in Israel said more than 50 missiles and rockets were fired from Lebanon into northern parts of the country on Tuesday morning, most of which were intercepted.

• Syrian air defences intercepted suspected Israeli missiles targeting the city of Tartous, Reuters reported, citing Syrian army sources. It comes after reports of multiple explosions heard over the Mediterranean port city early on Wednesday.

• The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has told world leaders that Lebanon is on the brink of becoming a second Gaza, adding the crisis has “become a non-stop nightmare that threatens to take the whole region down”. In response, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, accused the UN on Tuesday of not fulfilling its obligations in preventing rocket attacks into Israel by Hezbollah.

• The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, described the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as almost a “full-fledged war”. World leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the 79th UN general assembly as diplomatic efforts appear to have had little impact so far on the tensions on the border between Israel and Lebanon.

• Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said his country is open to ideas for de-escalating the conflict in Lebanon. “We are not eager to start any ground invasion anywhere … We prefer a diplomatic solution,” Danon told reporters on Tuesday.

• Two staff members of the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) were among the 558 people killed in Lebanon on Monday, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi said. The UN agency said it was “outraged and deeply saddened by the killing of two beloved members of the UNHCR family in Lebanon” and warned that the protection of civilians is a must under international humanitarian law.

• Nearly 30 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Nuseirat and Bureij camp refugee camps in central Gaza on Tuesday, according to hospital officials. A total of 29 Palestinians, including 14 children and 6 women, died as a result of the Israeli strikes on Tuesday, officials at Awda hospital said.

• The US president, Joe Biden, addressed the risk of a potential full-scale war in Lebanon. During an address to the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday, Biden said that a “full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest” and added that “even though the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible.”

• Britain is moving 700 troops to Cyprus to be ready for an emergency evacuation of UK citizens from Lebanon. The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, called for “restraint and de-escalation” at the border between Lebanon and Israel. Starmer made an unfortunate slip-up during his Labour party conference speech on Tuesday, calling for the return of “sausages” from Gaza.

• The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, called for coercive UN measures against Israel to be put on the agenda, including the use of force against Israel. Erdoğan, in his UN general assembly speech, accused the US of continuing to arm Israel so it can continue its massacres when in public it pretends it is looking for a ceasefire.