Unifil(3)

[Rhodes]

Yesterday Israel launched missile attacks within 700 metres of the Irish outpost UNP 6-52 and other locations in the Irish AO.

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irish-peacekeepers-shelter-israel-attacks-31254175

[Rhodes]

Irish UN peacekeepers in bunkers 'at least once daily'

Irish peacekeeping troops serving in southern Lebanon have been obliged to go to bunkers at least once a day, every day, over the past five days.

As first reported by RTÉ News, members of the 122nd Infantry Battalion have adopted the precautionary policy due to the spike in exchanges between the Israeli military and the Iranian backed Hezbollah militants.

A spokesman from the the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said today that the situation has been "definitely concerning", ever since Hamas killed 1,400 civilians on 7 October and Israel responded with a fortnight of air strikes on Gaza, killing more than 4,600 Palestinians.

Addressing the knock-on effect in southern Lebanon, Andrea Tenenti said while things have been "tense and volatile", he did not see "a serious will to escalate the situation" by the parties to the conflict.

He added that some of the exchanges have been very localised, with the same locations being hit close to the blue line dividing the countries.

Israeli has evacuated thousands of Israeli residents who live within two kiliometres of the Lebanese border.

Earlier this month, the commanding officer of Irish troops in Lebanon, Lieutenant Colonel Cathal Keohane, said there was "no chance" of the soldiers being withdrawn from the area despite the recent upsurge in attacks.

Speaking on RTÉ's Six One, he said: "There is absolutely no chance that we are withdrawing. We are here to achieve the mission and we remain until the mission is achieved."

In a statement today, the Defence Forces said: "For precautionary reasons troops were in Ground Hog at least once daily from Wednesday - Sunday."

https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/1023/14...nifil-lebanon/

[na grohmiti]

"obliged".

[Flamingo]

To do with the UNIFIL Area of Operation

. [ The Simmering Lebanese Front in Israel’s War

A series of tit-for-tat exchanges between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli Army risks blowing the Gaza offensive into a regional conflict.
October 21, 2023 A funeral for two Hezbollah soldiers who were killed yesterday by Israel Defense Forces.Photograph by Daniel Carde / Getty
A few days ago, in the town of Ayta ash-Shab, near Lebanon’s border with Israel, a dozen men were gathered on a ground-level terrace, preparing lunch. Three of them smoked narghiles while others stoked wood-fired barbecues. A lone man sat at a table, methodically preparing lamb skewers from a tray heaped with chunks of meat.

Some were clearly members of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group. They wore military boots, camouflage pants, and carried walkie-talkies. They barely said a word and refused to give their names. One man, who said he was in his fifties, did most of the talking. Someone referred to him as Abu Hady, a nickname.

Before Hezbollah emerged, in the early nineteen-eighties, Abu Hady said, his father and grandfather had been too afraid of Israeli troops to farm their land, which was close to the border.

“Now it’s the Israelis who are hiding,” a white-haired man said. In recent days, Israel had evacuated a number of small border towns and is emptying the city of Kiryat Shmona. “And we are on the border having a barbecue.”

“We want them to make a mistake,” another man said, referring to the Israelis. An error that might ignite the front.

“We want the front to open. We desire it,” Abu Hady said.

The sound of shelling boomed nearby. The man preparing the skewers said, “It’s from our side.”

“If one of us is injured, ten of them must be,” he added. “The balance has changed. The price of one of our martyrs is now very expensive, and the Israelis know this.”

Since Hamas’s devastating stealth attack on Israel some two weeks ago and the ferocious new war in Gaza, many eyes—particularly Israeli and Lebanese but also international—are focussed on this tense frontier between old foes, with one question in mind: will it reopen?

So far, there has been a series of tit-for-tat exchanges—artillery fire, Israeli air strikes—within a limited geographical area hugging the United Nations-delineated border known as the Blue Line. However, for the first time in decades, Hezbollah is not the only armed non-state actor operating in the south. So, too, are Palestinian factions: Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades and Hamas’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Lebanese Army is also there. In recent days, all of these groups have engaged Israeli forces in small attacks and counterattacks. Hezbollah’s activity has been carefully proportional, with a limited focus on military targets. It has released slick videos of its strikes and clearly stated what it meant to achieve with each.

Hezbollah has forbidden its members, including the thirteen ministers currently serving in Lebanon’s Parliament, from giving interviews. (“The Israelis are waiting on any word,” a spokesperson told me.) Despite some reports from foreign journalists who claim to have gleaned information from commanders they’ve met in Beirut’s cafés and elsewhere, the group is famously and frustratingly disciplined when it comes to messaging.

Last week, at a rally in Beirut, Sheikh Naim Qassem, the group’s deputy leader, said that Hezbollah is closely monitoring events in Gaza and that, “when the time comes to take action, we will.” (He reiterated that message in a speech on Saturday.) What will determine if and when that time comes? The speculation in Beirut is that Hezbollah might unleash its firepower if Israel begins a ground offensive in Gaza, or if Hamas and the Palestinian factions find themselves against a wall. For now, Hezbollah has made clear that it supports Palestinian armed action but is going to stay in the background.

The concern is that a rapid escalation in hostilities on the Lebanese border—or a miscalculation by one side—will blow open Israel’s northern front and transform the war in Gaza into a broader conflagration, with the potential to draw in other elements of the so-called Axis of Resistance, an alliance linking Iran to its regional partners: Hezbollah, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, the Houthis of Yemen, some Iraqi armed factions, and Hamas. They are all potential players in a strategic concept that Iran has touted as the “unity of fronts” against Israeli and American interests in the Middle East.

Recent days have provided a glimpse of what that “unity of fronts” might look like. On Thursday, the U.S.S. Carney, a U.S. Navy warship, intercepted and destroyed three missiles and several drones launched over the Red Sea by Houthi forces in Yemen. Earlier, missiles were launched from Syria into Israeli-occupied territory in the Golan Heights. Iraqi armed factions have targeted U.S. military bases in Iraq, and bases in Syria have also come under attack, in drone strikes that have caused only minor injury but sent a clear message that parties across the region are on high alert in this new war. Still, despite the proliferation of armed groups in various states and their potential to wreak havoc, Hezbollah stands alone as the greatest non-state threat to Israel.

The two have met in battle before, most notably culminating in 2000, when Hezbollah forced Israel to retreat from a vast swath of southern Lebanon, becoming the first and only Arab armed force to oust Israeli troops from occupied Arab territory. Their most recent full-blown encounter was in 2006, in what the Lebanese call the July War. (In Israel, it’s known as the Second Lebanon War.) The Winograd Commission, an Israeli postmortem of that conflict, released in 2008, lamented how “a semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages.” (Israel continues to occupy a sliver of Lebanese territory.)

Of all the Iranian-backed groups, Hezbollah is the most battle-hardened, disciplined fighting force. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defense Minister, reportedly described it as ten times stronger than Hamas—almost certainly an understatement, given that Hezbollah is believed to have an arsenal of more than a hundred thousand sophisticated missiles. This might explain why, even as Israel prepares for a ground invasion in Gaza, its drones are buzzing incessantly around southern Lebanon.

Israeli towns and settlements are easily visible from Lebanese border towns and villages. Along some parts of the frontier, Israel has erected a concrete barrier topped with vertical metal bars and surveillance cameras, which Hezbollah has already sniped blind. In addition to the evacuations on the Israeli side, some southern Lebanese towns have also largely emptied of residents. (Many other southerners have stayed, though.) On several trips this week, starting at Naqoura, one of Lebanon’s southernmost points, I saw shuttered windows and storefronts, and few vehicles or people on the roads.

At Ramyah, about sixteen miles east of Naqoura, a soldier with the Lebanese Army nervously poked his helmeted head out of a cinder-block checkpoint. “Proceed and go with God,” he said, before darting back inside.

Across southern Lebanon, posters of martyrs from various groups killed fighting Israel line the streets of many towns and villages. Some have almost faded beyond recognition, a reminder of how many generations have fought in the same conflict. There are Hezbollah’s martyrs; communist martyrs; Lebanese Army martyrs; martyrs from another Shiite Muslim political party, the Amal Movement; and many others.

There is an understanding, a grave fear in many quarters, that this time around Lebanon cannot afford another war with Israel, if it ever could. Lebanon in 2023 is not Lebanon in 2006. The men I met at the barbecue may have been keen to engage Israel, or to bluster about it, but many in the country want no part of it. They are struggling to feed and house their families in a crumbling, failed state that collapsed in 2019, in what the World Bank called one of the worst financial crises since the mid-eighteen-hundreds.

For the past year, bickering politicians have been unable to elect a President. The government exists only in a caretaker capacity. The central bank has no governor, because the next President must sign off on the nomination. There are, or will soon be, voids in the top security and military positions. The population is sharply split along pro- and anti-Hezbollah lines, owing largely to the group’s weapons stockpile, among other things. There are fewer guardrails than ever before to prevent the country from sliding into war.

In the village of Rmaych, the next town along the Blue Line from Ayta ash-Shab, I saw ten or so men sitting on plastic chairs near a monument to a fallen Lebanese Army martyr. They said that a missile had been launched from the town about an hour earlier, but not by the “sons of the town.” The implication, never stated, was that Hezbollah had used Rmaych as a launching pad. “Let them fight in their villages, not ours,” one of the men said. “We can’t stop them,” another, named Charbel, who was in his twenties, said. “We have asked the Army to keep us neutral. Who will compensate us except God for our damaged homes?”

The men said that, in the July War, in 2006, Rmaych welcomed neighbors fleeing from Ayta ash-Shab and elsewhere, and that this time, too, should the front explode, they intend to open their homes to any Lebanese person in need of refuge. “Our homes are their homes,” Charbel said, “but we want to live in dignity, and dignity starts with peace. We want peace, not war. We are sons of the state.”

The following afternoon, in the southern town of Kounine, hundreds of mourners gathered in the martyrs’ section of the hilltop cemetery to lay to rest one of five Hezbollah fighters who had been killed the previous day. A sea of black-clad men, women, and children paid their respects, walking through an honor guard of yellow Hezbollah flags that lined their path toward the freshly dug grave. They took turns kneeling down and touching the sand-colored soil while saying a quiet prayer. Grown men cried openly.

I overheard someone tell a friend that the dead fighter often frequented his café; he had no idea that the man was a member of Hezbollah. As the mourners slowly thinned, the dead fighter’s older brother emerged from the grave site. He was carrying a folded, green-fringed Hezbollah flag that had covered the coffin. He wiped his tears and received both condolences and congratulations on his brother’s martyrdom. His brother, he said, had left behind a two-year-old son named Elia and a pregnant wife. “You see these young men,” he said, as he walked downhill from the cemetery. “How many were there? Four hundred? Three hundred and fifty of them are martyrs in waiting. They say we love death”—an accusation made by many anti-Hezbollah Lebanese citizens—“but we love life, and what is greater than giving your life so that others can live in dignity?”

He apologized for cutting the conversation short, then got in his car and drove away. He had another Hezbollah funeral to get to, in another town, farther along the Blue Line. ♦

I

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispa...in-israels-war

[Rhodes]

Last night two mortar rounds hit a UNIFIL post injuring one peacekeeper. I believe the injured soldier is Nepalese.
Also, UNIFIL HQ in Naqoura was hit again yesterday. Thankfully, the shell failed to explode and there were no casualties,

https://unifil.unmissions.org/unifil-statement-5

https://unifil.unmissions.org/unifil-statement-6

[Rhodes]

Gunfire hits peacekeeper in south Lebanon: UN

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231112-gunfire-hits-peacekeeper-in-south-lebanon-un

[Rhodes]

Sky News joins Irish UN peacekeepers in Lebanon | Israel - Hamas war

[Flamingo]

The Escalating Violence Between Israel and Lebanon

There’s a sense of history repeating itself along the border, where tens of thousands have been displaced and the civilian death toll is climbing. Samira Ayoub and her three granddaughters were killed on Sunday night when an Israeli drone incinerated their family’s car.Photograph by Marwan Naamani / GettySave this story
The piercing wail of ambulances, their red and blue lights flashing, announced the arrival of Samira Ayoub and her three granddaughters: fourteen-year-old Rimas, twelve-year-old Talin, and the youngest, Layan, just ten years old. They were home, in the southern Lebanese town of Blida, and what seemed like all its residents, along with parliamentarians and people from neighboring towns, were there to greet them near the main square. On one side of the street were women in black chadors and abayas, many carrying A4-sized portraits of the three girls. They tossed rice and pink and white bougainvillea petals on the ambulances. On the other side stood uniformed teen-agers and men from Hezbollah’s Imam al-Mahdi scouts, a youth group affiliated with the Lebanese Scouting Federation.

Four coffins were removed from the ambulances and carried high through Blida’s narrow streets toward the cemetery. The girls’ coffins were covered in white flags emblazoned with the scout emblem and topped with wreaths; their grandmother’s was draped in black velvet embroidered with Islamic verses. A pickup truck mounted with speakers paved the way. As the procession passed an olive grove, a young man with a microphone led the chants: “Death to Israel! Death to America!”
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The four were killed on Sunday night when an Israeli drone incinerated their family’s car. The Israel Defense Forces later told the Times of Israel that it had struck a “suspicious vehicle containing several terrorists.” There were no men inside. The girls’ mother, Hoda, survived and remains hospitalized. Their father, Mahmoud, works in Africa. (Lebanon’s crippling financial crisis, which convulsed the country in 2019 and continues to reverberate, has pushed many Lebanese citizens to earn money abroad.) He came back to Blida for the funerals.

At the cemetery, Mahmoud wept as he laid his head on each of his daughter’s coffins. “My darling, my life, you are my life,” Mahmoud said, again and again. His own father stood near him. Over the loudspeaker, a man was talking about Gaza, about resistance to Israel, about defending the land, about double standards in international law, about victory, as Mahmoud quietly, inconsolably bade his daughters farewell. “These are my children,” he whispered to the men around him. “How are your children? Look at mine. My children are in heaven. Nobody will ask me again how they are.”

Rania, a local English teacher whom I met at the funeral, told me, “We’re not sure of anything after this. I think the response will be tough. The resistance must act.” She meant Hezbollah.

Samira and her granddaughters were killed on the same day that, elsewhere in southern Lebanon, an Israeli drone struck near two ambulances, wounding four paramedics. (The I.D.F. has said that it was targeting a “terrorist squad.”) Israel’s attacks on civilians and emergency vehicles represent a dangerous new escalation in the current conflict. And yet, for many Lebanese, it feels like déjà vu. Just days after the start, in 2006, of the July War—which Israelis call the Second Lebanon War—twenty-three civilians, many of them children, were killed in Israeli air strikes as they fled Marwahin, their small village near the border. Other, similar strikes followed. Ambulances were also targeted.

The latest round of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah began on October 8th, a day after Hamas’s devastating ambush in Israel. The U.N.-delineated border between Lebanon and Israel, known as the Blue Line, has been relatively quiet since the 2006 war, but it is now once again aflame in escalating, violent daily exchanges. At least ten Lebanese civilians, including a Reuters journalist, have been killed, as have two civilians in Israel.

On November 3rd, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, delivered a much anticipated speech, hailing what he considered the achievements of the Lebanese front: diverting Israeli military resources that might otherwise be put to use in the invasion of Gaza, displacing thousands of residents from northern Israel, and instilling fear of a full-blown regional war, a scenario he described as a “realistic possibility.” He directly blamed the United States for supporting Israel’s offensive in Gaza and warned that American interests would be targeted in any broader conflict. “Those who defeated you in Lebanon in the early eighties are still alive, and with them are their children and grandchildren, too,” he said.

Neither the threat of American aircraft carriers—two strike groups have been moved to the Middle East in recent weeks—nor the pleas of Arab and Western diplomats would influence Hezbollah’s calculus, according to Nasrallah. There would be only two determinants: Israel’s actions in Gaza and in Lebanon. “With all sincerity, transparency, clarity, and constructive ambiguity,” he said, “all possibilities are open on our Lebanese front.” He warned that, if Israel targeted Lebanese civilians, Hezbollah would follow a new rule, “a civilian for a civilian.” This weekend, Nasrallah will speak again, to mark an event that commemorates Hezbollah fighters lost in battle.

Hours after the attack on Samira and her grandchildren, Hezbollah lobbed rockets into Kiryat Shmona, a town in northern Israel. (It had already been largely evacuated.) Rania, the English teacher, told me that some people in Blida expect this to be a turning point. She said they were leaving town so that Hezbollah’s fighters could retaliate against Israel without feeling encumbered by the presence of civilians.

Fears of a widening war have already displaced more than twenty-five thousand people from Lebanon’s border region, around ten thousand of whom have sought refuge in the southern city of Tyre. Last week, Mortada Mhanna, the director of Tyre’s crisis-management administration, was seated at a long table in his office with several Red Cross volunteers and municipal workers. On the wall were two screens—one presented rolling news on Al Jazeera, and the other displayed the tally of displaced people. He didn’t have much time to chat. “Five minutes, yes?” he told me. Most of the displaced were housed in previously empty apartments or with relatives, he said, and about eight hundred were dispersed among four schools that served as shelters. “I’ve got six thousand mattresses for ten thousand people,” Mhanna said. “Every day, we have to fight for food and mattresses.”

He was already overstretched and underfunded—and afraid that further escalation on the border could propel a hundred thousand more people into Tyre alone. “It’s harder than 2006 because aid is arriving like a drip,” he said. In the 2006 war, up to a million people were displaced, according to the United Nations. Today, Lebanon is in significantly worse condition, a bankrupt state paralyzed by voids in leadership. The country hasn’t had a President for more than a year. The debilitating financial crisis has plunged around eighty per cent of the population into poverty. People struggle to feed themselves, let alone others. “International non-governmental organizations aren’t dealing with the situation as if we are in a war,” Mhanna said. “I am sitting in Tyre, and I say that we are at war. There is a war along the border. It’s a front line.”

History, before it is recorded and retold, is lived—and relived—by women such as Sara Faraj, who is twenty-five, and Nawal, her mother, who is sixty. They are from the southern border village of Ayta ash-Shab. Sara was a child during the 2006 war, displaced and living in a school in the adjacent village of Rmaych. For about a month, she’s found herself back in a classroom, this time in Tyre, now with her own children, and several other relatives. The ground floor of the school houses a dozen other families from several border villages, while the first floor continues to host students and regular classes.

In the 2006 war, the mosques in her village publicly broadcast a message to flee. This time, Sara and her family didn’t wait. “We are used to this now,” she said. “We immediately took the decision to leave.” They brought nothing. Her children are in donated clothes. Mhanna and his team were already working to stockpile heaters and blankets in anticipation of the displaced spending the winter in their school shelters. Sara’s eldest, a six-year-old daughter, doesn’t understand why she can’t go home, and misses playing with her toys. “They are not doing great,” Sara told me. “They’re bored here. I remember everything about the 2006 war, all of it, but mainly the fear, and I worry about what this war will do to my children.”

Nawal puffed on a cigarette as she watched over her grandchildren. Her home was destroyed in the 2006 war; afterward, she bulldozed the remains and rebuilt it. There were older conflicts, too: the twenty-two-year Israeli occupation of a swath of southern Lebanon, including her village, which ended in 2000. Before that, in the sixties and seventies, she remembers “Palestinians who would launch rockets from our village, and the Israelis would strike the Palestinians,” she said. “It was terrifying. What lovely memories! What more could we want? Our problem is that we were born in this country next to Israel.”

In Tyre’s Lebanese German University, which has also been transformed into a shelter, the families are from the village of Dhayra, about a hundred metres from the border. Residents say that shelling has damaged more than two dozen homes there. According to reports by Amnesty International, on October 16th Israel bombed the village with artillery shells containing white phosphorus, a violation of international humanitarian law. Many people fled after that attack. Fewer than a dozen are said to remain in the village.

Last week, the evening before Nasrallah’s speech, Nader Abo Sari, one of those last holdouts, parked his red tractor-trailer outside the German University. He had no intention of staying; he was in town only to sell his tobacco harvest. His trailer was bulging with rectangular burlap packages stuffed with dried tobacco leaves. His wife had taken their four young children to stay with her parents, farther north, but Abo Sari refused to leave his village, where he felt obliged to care for his handful of cows, sheep, and chickens, and to feed stray cats and abandoned animals. “It’s always very tense these days,” he said, standing at a distance from his tractor. “Instead of waking to the call to prayer, I wake to the sound of artillery hitting our area.” In 2006, Abo Sari said that he sought refuge in a mosque in the city of Sidon, about half an hour’s drive from Beirut. This time, he wouldn’t leave unless “the Israelis storm the village and kick me out.”

A few days later, I called Abo Sari to see how things were in Dhayra. He said that four or five families had recently returned to their homes. “People have had enough,” he said. “They’re fed up with displacement. It’s war, but not a war. And to say that it is peace, to feel better psychologically—it’s not peace. It’s not reassuring. If a person wants to return, there are no guarantees that things will calm down or get better. And, if you want to leave your home and live as a displaced person, it’s humiliating.”

As for his situation, he said that he’d “acclimatized,” joking that the missile strikes broke the monotony of village life. “It’s action,” he said, laughing, before extending an invitation to lunch in Dhayra. “It’ll be great,” he said. “The village is beautiful this time of year.

https://forum.irishmilitaryonline.com/forum/defence-forces/overseas/19113-unifil-3/page84#post741594

[Rhodes]

UNIFIL says Israeli gunfire hit one of its patrols in southern Lebanon

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said on Saturday that one of its patrols was hit by Israeli gunfire in the vicinity of Aytaroun of southern Lebanon, although there were no casualties.

UNIFIL condemned the attack on its peacekeepers, calling it "deeply troubling".

"We strongly remind the parties of their obligations to protect peacekeepers and avoid putting the men and women who are working to restore stability at risk," it said in a statement.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/unifil-says-israeli-gunfire-hit-one-its-patrols-southern-lebanon-2023-11-25/

While Aytaroun is in the Irish AO it was not an Irish patrol that was attacked.

[na grohmiti]

Along Israel's northern border with Lebanon, since 7 October the Israel Defence Forces have also been engaged in continuous fighting against the Lebanon-based Islamist armed group and political party Hezbollah. The group are seen as terrorists by governments including the UK, and have long been opposed to Israel’s presence in disputed lands in the south of the country - resulting not in a border, but a so-called ‘blue line’ drawn by the UN, dividing the two nations. From the Lebanese front line, embedded with Irish UN peacekeeping troops, Nafiseh Kohnavard reports.