MONITORING (SW) – US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke for the first time in weeks on Wednesday amid expectations of an imminent Israeli strike on Iran, which Yoav Gallant warned would be “deadly, precise and surprising”.
Netanyahu’s defence minister issued the warning in a video message on Israeli media on Wednesday night, broadcast after he postponed a scheduled trip to Washington.
Gallant said that the Iranian missile attack on Israel on 1 October had been a failure but would be avenged, reported Guardian.
“Whoever attacks us will be hurt and will pay a price. Our attack will be deadly, precise and above all surprising, they will not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results,” the Israeli defence minister said.
Gallant’s video message was broadcast a few hours after the conversation between Netanyahu and Biden, their first in seven weeks, which was joined by the vice-president, Kamala Harris, whose presidential campaign could be upset by the widening hostilities in the Middle East and any consequent spike in oil prices. It also emerged on Wednesday that Netanyahu last week spoke with Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump.
A White House readout of the call did not directly mention possible retaliation for the Iranian missile strike but said Biden had condemned Tehran’s attack “unequivocally” and pledged “ironclad” support for Israel.
In Lebanon on Wednesday, eight days into Israel’s ground invasion, clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces appeared to be spreading across the mountainous border area.
The group said it had pushed back Israeli troops near Labbouneh, close to the Mediterranean coast, and attacked units with rocket fire in the villages of Maroun el-Ras, Mays al-Jabal and Mouhaybib.
Heavy fire from Lebanon triggered rocket sirens and air defence interceptions across northern Israel on Wednesday, killing two people in the border town of Kiryat Shmona and wounding six in the major city of Haifa.
A quarter of Lebanon is now under Israeli evacuation orders, which have driven 1.2 million people from their homes. At least 1,400 have been killed in the last three weeks.
During their call Biden emphasized to Netanyahu the “need to minimize harm to civilians, in particular in the densely populated areas of Beirut”.
Many Lebanese people fear that Israel’s intense bombings and use of widespread evacuation orders mean the country faces a similar fate to Gaza, where 42,000 people have been killed in a year of fighting. The war was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October rampage in southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
