Though the ongoing new Israeli war in Iran has been taking a lot of the headlines, Israel’s old ongoing war during a ceasefire in Lebanon shows no signs of slowing down, with multiple attacks reported against the southern Lebanese coast throughout the weekend.
On Friday, an attack on a motorcycle in Chabriha, north of Tyre, killed one person. The IDF statement claimed he was a “top Hezbollah commander in the Litani sector.” There has been no confirmation of the person’s identity.
On Saturday, the Israeli Navy got into the “ceasefire,” going after a coastal building in Ras Naqoura that they claimed as “Hezbollah infrastructure.” They claimed the site belonged to the Radwan Force, Hezbollah’s special operations, and was being used to plan cross-border attacks on Israeli civilians.
The IDF claimed that the Ras Naqoura operation was the result of intelligence gathered from a “captured” Hezbollah member in recent weeks. Though they didn’t clarify this matter, this could well be related to an incident earlier this month where the Israeli Navy captured a fisherman in the same area of Lebanese territorial waters.
The Navy never said that the fisherman was Hezbollah, or really justified capturing him in any way. At the same time, there was never any report of him being released, so the timeline fits that they might’ve nabbed a fisherman and interrogated him until he gave them “intelligence” about an unassuming building off the coast of Ras Naqoura.
Whether that building was a valid target remains an open question, but the IDF seems to be going to great lengths to try to justify the attack, and to claim that the existence of the building was itself a violation of the ongoing ceasefire.
The claim of Hezbollah using such a building to actively plot cross-border operations against civilians does lack some credibility, however, since Hezbollah has not launched a single cross-border operation of any sort since the ceasefire went into effect in November. Israel, by contrast, has attacked Lebanon thousands of times since then.
Israel has also reported several other strikes over the weekend, saying they targeted other Hezbollah facilities that were in the process of being restored. No casualties were reported in these strikes.
