The Israel Defense Forces carried out airstrikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Thursday, which included an airstrip Israeli defense officials accused Iran of building for them.
This airfield is in the Qalaat Jabbour mountain region, and other targets were Tyre and Mghairiyeh, the IDF said.
“Fighter jets attacked a short time ago a series of military targets of the terrorist organization Hezbollah in the area of Tzur and Ma’ira in the territory of Lebanon,” IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said. “In one of the sites, there is a military airstrip and military infrastructure used by the organization to direct terrorism to the home of the state of Israel.”
Israeli and Hezbollah forces have engaged in limited fighting since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas, another U.S.-designated terrorist group. The two sides, which share a border, have refrained from an all-out war.
In September, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant accused Iran of building the airstrip “for terror purposes” during an annual conference of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya.
“In the pictures, you can see the Iranian flag flying over the runways, from which the ayatollah regime plans to operate against the citizens of Israel,” Gallant said. “In other words, the land is Lebanese, the control is Iranian, and the target is Israel.”
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Hezbollah has violated a United Nations Security Council resolution that bars it from maintaining a presence south of the Litani River, which is located roughly 18 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border.
Iran supports multiple autonomous militias and militant organizations throughout the Middle East that make up Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance.” It includes Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, who are carrying out attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, and militias in Iraq and Syria that have carried out more than 150 rocket and missile attacks against U.S. forces in the region since mid-October.
