Berri warns of Israel's 'expanding' attacks against Lebanon

Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri has warned against Israel's attempts to drag Lebanon into a broader war.

In remarks published Monday in al-Joumhouria newspaper, Berri said that israel has expanded the scope of its attacks against Lebanon and is now hitting areas relatively far from the border, deliberately targeting civilians, threatening and promoting proposals that are rejected by Lebanon, such as pushing for Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River, which lies about 30 kilometers north of the border.

An Israeli strike Sunday on the southern village of Kafra killed a Lebanese Hezbollah fighter and a woman and wounded several other people while another strike on Saturday killed two people in a car — one of them a Hezbollah commander — and two people in a nearby orchard, in an apparent shift in Israeli strategy toward targeted killings in Lebanon after more than three months of near-daily clashes with Hezbollah.

While the clashes had previously been limited mainly to a narrow strip within a few kilometers from the border, Israel in recent weeks appears to have moved to a strategy of targeted killings of figures from Hezbollah and allied groups, sometimes hitting in areas relatively far from the border, as was the case in Sunday’s and Saturday's strike near the Lebanese port city of Tyre.

On Jan. 2, a presumed Israeli airstrike killed a top Hamas official, Saleh Arouri, in a suburb of Beirut, the first such strike in Lebanon’s capital since Israel and Hezbollah fought a brutal one-month war in 2006.

On Sunday, Berri had met with former Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat and the two discussed the latest political developments, the Gaza war and the situation in the south.