He also addressed the people of Lebanon, insisting that “our war is not with you” and warning them that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was “leading you to the edge of the abyss”.
“I told you yesterday to evacuate homes in which there is a missile in the living room and a rocket in the garage. Whoever has a missile in the living room and a rocket in the garage will no longer have a home,” he said.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told an evening briefing that Hezbollah had turned southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley “into a combat zone” and that aircraft had continued to strike targets there throughout Tuesday.
He also released video footage that he said showed secondary explosions during strikes on residential buildings that indicated missiles and a truck carrying a rocket launcher had been stored inside them.
Hagari also said the head of Hezbollah’s missile and rocket unit, Ibrahim Qubaisi, had been killed in an air strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Tuesday afternoon, along with at least two other commanders who were with him at the time.
Qubaisi was “a key figure in activating missiles” and was “responsible for a series of attacks on Israeli territory”, he added.
Hezbollah confirmed in a Telegram post that Qubaisi had been “martyred” in a strike.
The Lebanese health ministry said six people were killed and 15 others injured in an “Israeli enemy raid” that partly destroyed the top two floors of a block of flats in Beirut’s Ghobeiry neighbourhood.
Hezbollah said that its fighters had fired barrages of rockets towards more than a dozen Israeli towns and military bases, as well as an explosives factory. It also claimed that a new type of rocket had been used to strike the IDF’s Samson unit.
Sirens continued to sound throughout the day across northern Israel and interceptor rockets from Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system were seen streaking into the sky.
Some of the approximately 300 rockets landed, causing damage and injuring six civilians and soldiers, most of them lightly, according to Hagari.
