Multiple Israeli air attacks reported in Lebanon
We have just received reports of Israeli air attacks on several locations across southern Lebanon.
Explosions have been heard in the southern city of Tyre and surrounding areas.
Three villages close to the border have also been hit. These “frontline villages” have been repeatedly hit during the course of the ongoing confrontations between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.
UN officials in Lebanon call for ‘maximum restraint’
The UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, and the head of the UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Aroldo Lazaro, have issued a joint statement on the rocket attack on Majdal Shams in occupied Golan Heights.
“We deplore the death of civilians – young children and teenagers – in Majdal Shams,” Hennis-Plasschaer and Lazaro said.
They also urged all parties to “exercise maximum restraint and to put a stop to the ongoing intensified exchanges of fire”, saying that escalation could “engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief”.
UNIFIL and the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon are “in contact with both Lebanon and Israel”, they added.
Joint Statement of @JeanineHennis and @aroldo_lazaro:
We deplore the death of civilians - young children and teenagers - in Majdal Shams. Civilians must be protected at all times.
— UNIFIL (@UNIFIL_) July 27, 2024
What is the Golan Heights?
The Golan Heights is a strategic plateau bordering Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. While it is internationally recognised as part of Syria, two-thirds of the area has been occupied by Israel since it was captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. Syria attempted to retake the area in 1973, but failed.
A UN observer force has been supervising the ceasefire line ever since.
Israel has built dozens of illegal settlements in the occupied Golan Heights – and in 1981, declared that it was annexing the territory. About 20,000 illegal Israeli settlers now live there, alongside approximately 20,000 Druze Arabs.
Mouin Rabbani, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, said the occupied Golan Heights are a “mountain range that allows Israel to threaten the rest of Syria”, including the Syrian capital, Damascus.
“It’s worth recalling that after 1967, Israel built its first settlements not in the West Bank, but in the Golan Heights,” Rabbani told Al Jazeera. “And it annexed the Golan Heights formally in 1980, for which it was condemned by the UN Security Council. There were diplomatic negotiations between Israel and Syria during the 1990s, but these failed because ultimately, Israel was unprepared to accept a comprehensive withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines.”
Israel has since built major intelligence installations there, and following the war on Gaza, Hezbollah has launched attacks on these facilities, as part of its effort to support Palestinians under attack in the coastal enclave, Rabbani noted.
“I think there’s another element here,” he added. “As you know, the International Court of Justice recently ruled Israel’s rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem, to be unlawful and illegal and said it must end immediately. Although the Golan Heights was not part of that case, I think the determinations made by the ICJ about the occupied Palestinian territories apply just as clearly to the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.”
