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The US and Germany have urged their citizens to leave Lebanon as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “severe” retaliation for a rocket attack blamed on Hizbollah that killed 12 people on Saturday.
The strike on a football pitch where youngsters were playing was the deadliest event for civilians in Israeli-controlled territory in the exchanges fire between Israel and Hizbollah since they began nine months ago, and has sparked fears that the hostilities could spill over into a full-blown war.
“The State of Israel will not, and cannot, ignore this,” Netanyahu said during a visit on Monday to Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the occupied Golan Heights. “Our response will come, and it will be severe.”
Hizbollah, which denied responsibility for the attack, and Israeli forces have traded near-daily fire since the Lebanese militant group began firing rockets at Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas following the October 7 attack.
While the hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah have caused casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border, they have so far not morphed into a full-blown conflict, amid intense diplomatic efforts led by the US to de-escalate the situation.
But amid mounting concerns that Israel and Hizbollah could be yet drawn into an escalatory spiral, Rena Bitter, US assistant secretary of state for the bureau of consular affairs, urged US citizens in Lebanon to “develop a crisis plan of action, and leave before a crisis begins”.
“Regularly scheduled commercial transportation is always the best option while local communications and transport infrastructure are intact and operating normally,” she said, adding that once commercial air travel was no longer available, US citizens in Lebanon should be prepared to “shelter in place for long periods of time”.
Germany issued a similar warning, with foreign ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer appealing to Germans “to use all options that currently exist to leave Lebanon and to do it urgently”.
“We are calling on all Germans to leave Lebanon while there’s still time. We’re not saying that for the hell of it, this is due to the very difficult situation that will arise if it comes to a regional conflagration,” he said.
Several airlines have suspended flights to Beirut in recent days, with Germany’s Lufthansa Group announcing it would cancel all travel to and from the Lebanese capital until August 5, and Greece’s Aegean Airlines also cancelling some flights.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines said it was rescheduling some flights on Monday as it tried to distribute “insurance risks for its aircraft” between Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries.
Israel’s security cabinet on Sunday authorised Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to decide how and when to retaliate against Hizbollah.
Diplomats said they expected Israel’s response to be more forceful than any of the strikes it had conducted in Lebanon since the start of hostilities nine months ago, but that it would try to avoid triggering an all-out war.
“I think they will try and calibrate their response so as to not tip the region into war,” said one diplomat. “But it’s a difficult balance to strike.”
Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hizbollah have continued in the days since the rocket strike in Majdal Shams, but at a relatively low intensity.
Israel’s military said on Monday that it had downed a drone fired from Lebanon, while Lebanese media reported that an Israeli drone strike in southern Lebanon had killed two people and injured three more, including a child.