Hezbollah has warned Israel that it is braced and 'ready' for war - as Israeli forces appear to be edging closer to a ground invasion of Lebanon.
Israeli special forces are already carrying out raids in Lebanon ahead of an imminent incursion aimed at ousting Hezbollah, officials claimed today.
Elite commandos were said to be targeting the Iran-backed group's infrastructure, including weapon sites and control centres, as it scrambles to recover from the loss of long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah.
'They are targeting key sites which have been built across the border zone,' an Israeli official told The Telegraph.
IDF tanks have massed on the northern border ahead of an anticipated incursion into Lebanon despite resounding pressure from Israel's allies to de-escalate at once as they fear a collapse into all-out war.
Lebanon is also reported to be sending its army to the southern border. Israel maintains that its war is with Hezbollah, not the people of Lebanon, as it prepares to move north.
Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel since the war in Gaza broke out last October, in response to the Israeli bombing of the Strip.
As Hezbollah scrambles to appoint a new leader and vows retaliation, allies have been urging a ceasefire deal to stop the conflict from breaking out into a wider regional war.
Still, Israel looks to capitalise on its momentum, having taken out dozens of officials linked to Hezbollah - and Hamas and Iran - in a week of intensive strikes.
Hamas today announced that its leader in Lebanon had been killed by Israeli air strikes.
Fateh Sherif Abu al-Amine died today in a strike on the Al-Buss refugee camp in the southern city of Tyre - days after Hezbollah's long-standing chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut.
The group said al-Amine was killed with his wife, son and daughter in what it called a 'terrorist and criminal assassination'.
That statement came hours after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine(PFLP), a secular left-wing group, said three of its members were killed in a strike on Beirut's Kola district early today.
Most of Israel's attacks against Hezbollah have so far been carried out in the south of Lebanon or Beirut's southern suburbs.
But this morning's attack in the Kola district was the first within Beirut's city limits - another escalation that observers fear could could trigger a wider war, dragging in Iran and the United States.
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