Lebanon and its people “must understand that Hezbollah is dragging them into a war that is not theirs,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday, urging Beirut to look out for itself “as soon as possible.”
The Iranian-backed terrorist army is doing this “only because of the death of that mass murderer who has nothing to do with them,” he stated during a visit to the Palmachim Airbase, referencing slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Netanyahu spoke just hours before Hezbollah targeted the Tel Aviv region with rockets for the first time since the ceasefire agreement brokered by the United States went into effect on Nov. 27, 2024.
A man in his 40s in Holon—a city just south of Tel Aviv—sustained a head wound while running for shelter and was evacuated to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center’s Ichilov Hospital in moderate condition.
Netanyahu in his remarks reiterated that Hezbollah “made a very big mistake” when it opened another front against Israel, warning: “We’ve already responded forcefully and will respond with even greater force.”
Hezbollah began firing missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles at the Jewish state on Monday in retaliation for the targeted elimination of Khamenei at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. military on Feb. 28.
Israeli intelligence confirms that following the start of the war, Iranian officials “put immense amounts of pressure” on Hezbollah to fire at Israel, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, the IDF spokesperson to the international media, revealed in an X post on Tuesday.
“Hezbollah’s decisions prove that their interests lie with the Iranian regime, and most definitely not with the people of Lebanon,” he said.
During a visit to troops of the IDF’s Air Defense Array on Tuesday, Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said Jerusalem was determined to eliminate the Hezbollah threat and would not stop until it was fully disarmed.
“We are operating in Iran and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are two major adversaries of ours and they share many characteristics. This is one axis—the Shi’ite axis, the Iranian axis and its proxies,” he stated.
The Israeli military struck approximately 60 Hezbollah targets in Southern Lebanon throughout the day on Tuesday, the IDF said.
Among the targets struck were arms-storage facilities, missile launchers, command centers and a number of other “terrorist infrastructure sites” in Southern Lebanon’s Tyre and Sidon regions, according to the IDF.
Lebanon has pledged to disarm Hezbollah under a U.S.-brokered truce agreement reached in November 2024, which ended the fighting that began when the terrorist group joined Hamas’s war against Israel.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said on Monday that the country rejects attacks launched from Lebanese territory not taken by legitimate state institutions and declared a ban Hezbollah’s “military activities.”
“The decision of war and peace is exclusively in the hands of the state, which requires limiting Hezbollah’s activities and obliging it to surrender its weapons,” he said, per Beirut-based An-Nahar.
