Hezbollah rejects truce talks as Israel presses Lebanon strikes

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said negotiations with Israel under fire would amount to “surrender”, as the Iran-backed group launched attacks and Israel said it was expanding a “buffer zone” inside Lebanon.

Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for around two decades until 2000, has kept up strikes on its northern neighbour and sent ground troops to take control of a strip up to the Litani River, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military had already “created a genuine security zone” and was now expending it, pushing deeper into Lebanon.

“We are simply creating a larger buffer zone” that could prevent a ground invasion of Israel and missile attacks, Netanyahu said in a video shared by his office.

Hezbollah meanwhile issued dozens of statements claiming attacks on Israeli forces, and said it also launched missiles early on Thursday at military sites in central Israel, where air raid sirens sounded.

Israeli media said six Hezbollah rockets headed for central areas were all intercepted.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on both sides to cease fire. He warned Israel against replicating “the Gaza model” in southern Lebanon as some Israeli officials have suggested, raising fears of mass displacement.

Hezbollah said its fighters had launched more than 80 attacks on Wednesday, the largest daily number in the current war, and attacked Israeli forces in nine border towns.

Israel’s military said that one of its soldiers was severely wounded by rocket fire in southern Lebanon and another by mortar shell, having earlier reported an officer being lightly injured in combat.

Rockets fired towards the Haifa area in northern Israel resulted in no injuries.

Lebanon was pulled into the Middle East war when Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on March 2 to avenge the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In an attempt to put an end to the fighting, Lebanon’s president is calling for unprecedented direct negotiations with Israel, which has so far rebuffed his proposal.

Hezbollah chief Qassem said Wednesday his group would have none of it: “When negotiations with the Israeli enemy are proposed under fire, this is an imposition of surrender.”

Health workers killed

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported Israeli strikes and artillery shelling in several locations in the south on Wednesday, where the health ministry said at least eight people were killed.

The NNA also reported an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Israel’s military claimed it struck a “command centre” there after a renewed evacuation warning.

An AFP correspondent saw a street covered in debris, including shattered cement and warped metal, after the early morning strike, while an apartment building’s upper floors appeared damaged.

The area has been targeted multiple times during the conflict and is largely empty of residents, who have fled.

Hezbollah said its fighters targeted Israeli troops “massed in the border towns of Naqura and Qawzah” and in sites across the border “with more than 100 rockets” on Wednesday.

According to the Lebanese health ministry, 42 health workers are among more than 1,000 people killed in Lebanon in more than three weeks of Israeli strikes.

Lebanese authorities say upwards of one million people have been displaced.