Israel launched airstrikes on Beirut for the first time since agreeing to the ceasefire with Lebanon in mid-April, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the airstrikes in a joint statement on Wednesday, saying they targeted a senior Hezbollah official whose force had launched rockets at Israeli communities and targeted Israeli soldiers.
“The IDF has just struck in Beirut the commander of the Radwan Force in the Hezbollah terror organization to eliminate him,” Netanyahu and Katz said in the statement.
Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group that resides in Lebanon, reignited their conflict after Hezbollah launched strikes at Israel over the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Feb. 28 that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Israel and Lebanon first agreed to an initial 10-day ceasefire on April 16, days after President Donald Trump urged Netanyahu to slow strikes against Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut.
On April 23, Trump announced the initial ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon had been extended by three weeks, meaning it would expire on Thursday, May 14. However, Hezbollah and Israel have traded barbs in southern Lebanon throughout the ceasefire agreement, though Beirut remained untouched until Wednesday.
But the Wednesday attack on the suburb of Beirut, a region that has already taken multiple missile barrages from Israel, causing an exodus of civilians before the ceasefire, puts the already-fragile ceasefire on thin ice.
Hezbollah had not yet responded to Netanyahu and Katz’s statement by the time of publication.
TRUMP CLAIMS THERE IS NO DEADLINE ON PEACE DEAL TO END IRAN WAR
The attack comes as Trump has been working to hammer out a peace deal in the broader conflict with Iran.
“We’ve had very good talks over the last 24 hours, and it’s very possible that we’ll make a deal,” Trump told White House reporters on Wednesday.