Netanyahu orders army to fight on in Lebanon as US pushes for ceasefire

TEL AVIV — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that media reports suggesting there could be an imminent ceasefire in Lebanon were “incorrect” and that he has told the Israeli military to continue fighting “with full force.”

Meanwhile, a new wave of Israeli airstrikes hit Lebanon on Thursday afternoon local time.

The Lebanese state news agency NNA reported attacks on southern and eastern Lebanon and areas bordering Syria.

The Israeli military said it was “striking Hezbollah terror targets” in the country, adding that it “attacked infrastructures used to transfer weapons from Syrian territory to Hezbollah.”

“Fighter jets of the Air Force recently attacked infrastructures on the Syria-Lebanon border, which are used by the terrorist organization Hezbollah to transfer weapons from Syrian territory to Hezbollah in Lebanon,” it said in a statement.

Sirens sounded in northern Israel as around 45 rockets were launched toward the country from Lebanon this morning.

“Following the alerts that were activated in the Western Galilee area, about 45 launches were detected that crossed the territory of Lebanon, some of them were intercepted and the rest fell in open areas,” the Israeli military said.

Prior to this, the last rocket fire into northern Israel had been around 19 hours earlier.

Hezbollah said it had sent a “barrage of rockets” towards Kiryat Motzkin and military sites north of Haifa in “defense of Lebanon” and in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Netanyahu has not responded to a ceasefire proposal made by the United States and France, the statement from his office said.

“The news about a ceasefire is incorrect. This is an American-French proposal, to which the prime minister did not even respond,” the statement read.

“The news about the supposed directive to moderate the fighting in the north is also the opposite of the truth. The prime minister instructed the (Israel Defense Forces) to continue the fighting with full force, and according to the plans presented to him.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday that “there will be no ceasefire in the north,” and Israel will continue to fight Hezbollah “with all our might until victory and the safe return of residents of the north to their homes.”

An Israeli official told CNN earlier that talks over a potential temporary ceasefire with Hezbollah are a main motivator for Netanyahu’s trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly. — CN