JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the idea of a ceasefire in Lebanon on Tuesday that would leave Hezbollah close to his country’s northern border as the militant group threatened to widen its attacks.
Netanyahu’s comments came as the United States ramped up pressure on him over the conduct of Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, criticizing the recent bombing of Beirut and demanding that more aid reach the Palestinian territory.
In a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu said he was “opposed to a unilateral ceasefire, which does not change the security situation in Lebanon, and which will only return it to the way it was,” according to a statement from his office.
Netanyahu and the Israeli military have repeatedly insisted there must be a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Lebanon where there is no presence of Hezbollah fighters.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu clarified that Israel would not agree to any arrangement that does not provide this (a buffer zone) and which does not stop Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping,” the statement said.
In a defiant televised speech, the group’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said the only solution was a ceasefire while threatening to expand the scope of its missile strikes across Israel.
“Since the Israeli enemy targeted all of Lebanon, we have the right from a defensive position to target any place” in Israel, he said.
In another day of fighting, the Iran-backed group said it launched a barrage of rockets toward the northern Israeli city of Haifa and targeted Israeli bulldozers and a tank near the border.
Israel’s military bombed several areas in southern and eastern Lebanon on Tuesday, including in the Bekaa Valley where a hospital in Baalbek city was put out of service, Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported.
It also said it had captured three Hezbollah fighters in south Lebanon.
Asked about Israeli air strikes in Lebanon, in which residential buildings in the center of Beirut were hit on October 10, the US State Department voiced open criticism.
“We have made clear that we are opposed to the campaign the way we’ve seen it conducted over the past weeks” in Beirut, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
In a letter sent to the Israeli government on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also warned that the United States could withhold weapons deliveries unless more humanitarian aid was delivered to Palestinians in Gaza.
The letter made “clear to the government of Israel that there are changes that they need to make again to see that the level of assistance making it into Gaza comes back up from the very, very low levels that it is at today,” Miller added on Tuesday.
Despite the need for food, medical supplies and shelter in hunger-ravaged Gaza, a spokesman for the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF said Tuesday that aid was facing the tightest restrictions since the start of Israel’s offensive in October last year.
“We see now what is probably the worst restrictions we’ve seen on humanitarian aid, ever,” spokesman James Elder told a press conference in Geneva, adding that there were “several days in the last week (where) no commercial trucks whatsoever were allowed to come in.”
For over a week, Israeli forces have engaged in a sweeping air and ground assault targeting northern Gaza and the area around Jabalia amid claims that Hamas militants were regrouping there.
“The whole area has been reduced to ashes,” said Rana Abdel Majid, 38, from the Al-Faluja area of northern Gaza.
Majid said entire blocks had been levelled by “the indiscriminate, merciless bombing.”
At a school-turned-shelter hit by an Israeli strike in the central Nuseirat camp, Fatima Al-Azab said “there is no safety anywhere” in Gaza.
“They are all children, sleeping in the covers, all burned and cut up,” she said.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza after an October 7 attack by Hamas that resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures, including hostages killed in captivity.
The Israeli campaign has killed 42,344 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory which the UN considers reliable.
Israel dramatically escalated its air campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon from September 23 and then launched a ground offensive a week later intended to push the group back from its northern border.
Hezbollah has been firing thousands of projectiles into Israel over the last year in support of Hamas, displacing tens of thousands of Israelis.
At least 1,356 people have been killed in Lebanon since Israel escalated its bombing last month, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.
The war in Lebanon, which has suffered years of economic crisis, has displaced at least 690,000 people, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.
Israel is also weighing how to respond to Iran’s decision to launch around 200 missiles at the country on October 1.
Netanyahu’s office said that Israel — and not its top ally the United States — would decide how to strike back.
“We listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interest,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Iranian barrage was in retaliation for an Israeli strike in Lebanon’s Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian general Abbas Nilforoushan on September 27.
US President Joe Biden — whose government is Israel’s top arms supplier — has warned Israel against striking Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities.
According to a Washington Post report on Monday citing unnamed US officials, Netanyahu reassured the White House that Israel was only contemplating targeting military sites.

ISTANBUL: The Turkish government on Tuesday postponed until 2025 a parliamentary debate on a proposed tax on credit cards, which it sought to fund the arms industry as conflict rages in its neighborhood.
Indignant Turks, who already face double-digit inflation, called their banks to lower their credit limits after the governing AKP party submitted the tax bill to parliament on Friday.
After the public outcry, the AKP announced Tuesday that it was delaying debating the bill until next year.
“There were certain objections from our citizens, we will examine all of this in detail,” said the AKP’s parliamentary group chairman, Abdullah Guler.
“We have postponed our discussions and we will reconsider, after the budget, if there are some points to change or remove,” he said.
The proposed legislation came as Israel’s conflicts with Tehran-backed Islamist militants in Gaza and Lebanon, and missile strikes by Iran, have raised global concerns that a broader war could erupt in the Middle East.
“Our country has no choice but to increase its deterrent power. There’s war in our region right now. We are in a troubled neighborhood,” Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek told private broadcaster NTV earlier on Tuesday.
The bill stipulated that people with a credit card limit of at least 100,000 liras (nearly $3,000) would have to pay an annual 750 lira ($22) in tax from January to bolster the defense industry.
“If we increase our deterrent power, then our ability to protect against fire in the region will increase,” Simsek had said, though he added that the bill was in the hands of parliament and that the AKP, could “re-evaluate” it.
When he proposed the tax on Friday, Guler said that Israel’s next target would be Turkiye, an argument often cited by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A vocal critic of Israel’s offensive in Gaza and Lebanon, Erdogan doubled down on the threat posed by Israel when addressing a conference hosted by his AKP party on Tuesday.
“Even if there are those who cannot see the danger approaching our country... we see the risk and take all kind of measures,” he said.
Turkiye’s defense industry has enjoyed a boom in recent years but Simsek said the sector still needed a boost.
The defense industry is planning to invest in 1,000 projects, including an air defense system that would protect Turkiye from missile assaults, Simsek said.
Turkiye allocated 90 billion lira from the budget to fund the defense industry last year, he added.
“This year, we increased it to 165 billion lira. Maybe we will need to double this even more.”
Turkiye’s defense companies signed contracts in 2023 worth a total of $10.2 billion, according to Haluk Gorgun, the head of Turkiye’s state Defense Industry Agency (SSB).
The top 10 Turkish defense exporters contributed nearly 80 percent of total export revenue, he said.
Sales of Turkish Baykar drones, used in Nagorno-Karabakh or Ukraine, amounted to $1.8 billion.
Last week, parliament held a closed-door session for the government to explain why it saw Israel as a potential threat, but the opposition said it was not convinced.
The spokesman for Turkiye’s main opposition CHP party, Deniz Yucel, said Monday that the government was exploiting nationalist feelings to sweep an “economic crisis” under the carpet.
Inflation has spiralled over the past two years, peaking at an annual rate of 85.5 percent in October 2022.
Official data showed it had slowed to 49.4 percent in September.
“The AKP is trying to create a fake ‘foreign threat and war agenda’ with the rhetoric of ‘Israel may attack us’,” Yucel said.
“We know and see that they are trying to disguise the economic crisis they caused.”