Israeli aircraft carried out an airstrike on a base belonging to a Palestinian terrorist group deep inside Lebanon early Monday morning, Arabic media reported, amid a dramatic spike in tensions.
The reports said the strikes hit a base belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a Syria-based terrorist group that fights alongside Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
The base near the town of Qusayr in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, near the border with Syria.
Videos posted on social media showed explosions, accompanied by heavy anti-aircraft fire.
A spokesman for the group told the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel that the “Israeli bombing in the Bekaa did not achieve its objectives,” but gave no further details.
There was no comment from the IDF. While Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, attacks inside Lebanon are rare. In the few cases when Israel has hit targets in the Bekaa Valley, it has been to stop the transfer of advanced arms from Iran to Hezbollah, via Syria.
The PFLP-GC — not to be confused with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which it split off from in 1968 — was responsible for a number of vicious terror attacks in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, including one against a school bus in northern Israel, which killed nine children and three adults.
The reported strike follows the bombing of an Iran-linked base in Syria on Saturday that Israel said foiled a plot to launch killer drones into Israel, a drone attack on a Hezbollah office in Beirut and an attack on an Iran-linked militia in Iraq, both on Sunday
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday warned neighboring countries that they would be held accountable for any attacks against the Jewish state emanating from their territory.
“We won’t tolerate attacks on Israel from any country in the area. Any country that allows its territory to be used for attacks against Israel will bear the consequences. I stress: The state will bear the consequences,” Netanyahu, who is also defense minister, said during a tour of the Golan Heights with IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi.
The attacks sparked vows of revenge from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and from Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
“These insane operations will surely be the last steps of the Zionist regime,” tweeted Soleimani.
Nasrallah threatened Israel with a reprisal attack after two of its members were killed in an Israeli strike in Syria, and two UAVs crashed in and around the terror group’s Beirut offices in an incident also blamed on the Jewish state.
“From tonight, I tell the Israeli army on the border, be prepared and wait for us,” said the Hezbollah leader in a televised address, taunting that a retaliation could come in “one day, two days, three days…”
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri condemned Israel for allegedly sending drones, calling it a “blatant attack on Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
“This new aggression… forms a threat to regional stability and an attempt to push the situation towards more tension,” Hariri said in a statement.
Hariri also charged that it was in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War between Israel and terror group Hezbollah.
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