Yesterday evening, Tuesday, the Lebanese Hezbollah denied the Israeli occupation army’s claim that it had assassinated the party’s marching unit or air force official, Ali Hussein Burji, amid escalating confrontations between the two sides, which threatens the expansion of the conflict.
The party said in a statement, “The Zionist entity’s broadcasting authority and the military spokesman for the Israeli occupation army claimed that the enemy assassinated what he sometimes called the official of the Hezbollah marching unit and the air force official at other times.”
The statement added, “The official of the party’s marching unit or air force was never subjected to any assassination attempt, as the enemy claimed.”
The military spokesman for the occupation army, Daniel Hagari, had announced the assassination of the Hezbollah marching unit official in an air strike in southern Lebanon, hours after announcing that he had led an attack on a military base in northern Israel.
Hagari said, according to what was reported by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on its website, “We targeted him using an Israeli Air Force plane. Burji led dozens of attacks against Israel using drones.”
The expansion of the battles
Earlier, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz announced, in a television interview, that Israel was behind the killing of Hezbollah leader Wissam al-Tawil the day before yesterday.
Katz warned that in the event of a major war, Lebanon “will receive a blow 50 times stronger than the one it received in the Second Lebanon War (in 2006),” as he put it.
According to observers, the situation in which Hezbollah maintained specific rules of engagement in the military confrontation with Israel, as a front supporting the Gaza Strip, collapsed with the expansion of the battles with Israel, following assassinations it carried out in Lebanon.
The confrontations between the two sides escalated following the assassination of Tel Aviv’s Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas in the southern suburb of Beirut, on January 2, and the prominent Hezbollah field commander, Wissam Tawil, in an Israeli raid that targeted his car in southern Lebanon on Monday.
Yesterday evening, an official Israeli channel reported that the Ministry of Health had directed hospitals in the north to prepare to accommodate thousands of wounded, against the backdrop of the increasing pace of escalation with the Lebanese Hezbollah.
The Kan channel, affiliated with the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (official), said that the Director-General of the Ministry of Health, Moshe Bar Siman Tov, directed all hospitals to be able to switch to emergency mode within 24 hours of being asked to do so.
She explained that this means that when necessary, hospitals will move to protected places (shelters) and release patients who can be discharged, and prepare to receive many infected people.