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      Sinwar’s Final Moments: On the Run, Hurt, Alone, but Still Defiant

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      Israeli forces had been steadily closing in on Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for weeks before he was cornered and killed in a ruined house in the Gaza Strip.At the end, the fearsome militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war seemed barely a threat.In video captured by an Israeli drone, a man sat alone, badly wounded and caked in dust amid the ruins of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a kaffiyeh and staring directly into the camera. The man, Israeli officials say, was Yahya Sinwar, the chief of Hamas.The stare-down lasted some 20 seconds, then the man limply but defiantly hurled a broken piece of wood toward the drone. Not long afterward, officials say, an Israeli soldier shot him in the head, and a tank shell flattened part of the building.So ended the long hunt for one of the world’s most wanted men. It began hours after the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that Mr. Sinwar helped orchestrate, and concluded amid the destruction of a Rafah neighborhood resembling so many parts of Gaza, leveled by the Israeli military in the year since.The manhunt involved Israeli commandos and spies, as well as a special unit established inside the headquarters of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, and at the Central Intelligence Agency. It used a sophisticated electronic surveillance dragnet and ground-penetrating radar provided by the United States.New details about Mr. Sinwar’s movements over the past year have emerged since his death, including the fact that Israeli intelligence officers had seen mounting evidence since August that Mr. Sinwar, or possibly other top Hamas leaders, might be in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Will Become of Yahya Sinwar’s Body?

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      The death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was confirmed Thursday by Israeli authorities, but questions remain about the location of his body and what may happen to it in the future.Mr. Sinwar was killed by a gunshot wound to the head in southern Gaza during a firefight, Dr. Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday. Dr. Kugel oversaw the autopsy and, after it was complete, Mr. Sinwar’s body was handed over to the Israeli military, he said. He did not know where it was being kept.Israel often holds the corpses of Palestinians, hoping to use them in a future exchange with Hamas or other militant groups, just as Hamas has done with the bodies of hostages killed on or after the Hamas-led attack in Israel. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Sinwar’s body will be held, released back to Hamas or otherwise interred.The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.When asked about an exchange, experts said it is unlikely that Israeli officials would create a situation where his body would be laid to rest in a place that could become a shrine.“What I would imagine would happen is there will be a secret dignified burial in an undisclosed place,” said Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, adding “when bin Laden was killed, he received a dignified Muslim funeral.”When Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was killed in 2011 by U.S. forces, he was quickly buried at sea. That was likely done to avoid the possibility of a shrine, in accordance with Muslim tradition, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.Dr. Kugel estimated that Mr. Sinwar’s autopsy took place between 24 to 36 hours after death, but he could not specify an exact time.Mr. Alterman said that Israeli officials likely have robust protocols in place to deal with the deaths of militants. “There will be a huge Israeli effort to make sure there is nothing left to be an object of veneration,” he said.The burial site will likely be in Israel, he said, and Israelis will want to avoid a situation where his supporters could try to claim he was buried in Palestinian territories as a martyr.When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Iran in late July, Israelis did not have custody of his body. Mr. Haniyeh was buried in Qatar’s capital city, Doha, where hundreds of mourners reportedly lined the streets as his coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, passed through the streets.Aaron Boxerman More

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      Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar Was Killed After a Surprise Battlefield Encounter

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      Although Yahya Sinwar was a major target of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the soldiers who killed the militant chief had not expected to run across him, Israeli officials said.Yahya Sinwar has been the No. 1 target for Israel since the beginning of the war in Gaza.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York TimesIt was a routine patrol for a unit of Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip. Then a firefight erupted and the Israelis, backed by drones, destroyed part of a building where several militants had taken cover, Israeli officials said.When the dust cleared and they began searching the building, the soldiers found a body that bore a striking resemblance to someone they had not expected to find, a man their country had been hunting for since Oct. 7, 2023: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.For more than a year, as tens of thousands of Gazans were killed, Mr. Sinwar had eluded the full force of Israel’s military and security establishment, which had dedicated every means at its disposal to finding and killing him. Many believed he was hiding underground in Gaza and had surrounded himself with hostages taken from Israel.In the end, the Israeli officials said, he was killed above ground on Wednesday, alongside two other militants, with no sign of hostages nearby. The Israeli authorities said they had confirmed his death on Thursday, using dental records and fingerprints. His DNA was also tested for confirmation, according to one Israeli official and the White House.Mr. Sinwar’s death was the most severe blow to Hamas’s leadership after more than a year of escalating violence in the Middle East, and it immediately plunged the war in Gaza into a new and uncertain phase. It came less than three weeks after Israeli forces killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike south of Beirut, the Lebanese capital. More

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      US warns Israel of potential halt to arms transfers if Gaza aid is not distributed

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      The Biden administration has warned Israel that it faces possible punishment, including the potential stopping of US weapons transfers, if it does not take immediate action to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza.A letter written jointly by Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary, exhorts Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to ease humanitarian suffering in the territory by lifting restrictions on the entry of assistance within 30 days or face unspecified policy “implications”.The four-page missive, dated 13 October, was sent to Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, and Ron Dermer, the strategic affairs minister, and came to light after being posted on social media by Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist who works for Axios, after apparently being leaked.Its authenticity was confirmed by a state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, at a news briefing on Tuesday.Humanitarian groups have made repeated calls for increased deliveries of food and medicine to Gaza, but aid shipments to the embattled territory are currently at their lowest level in months, the UN said last week.Miller said the US side had intended the letter to be a private diplomatic communication and said its timing was not influenced by next month’s presidential election, which features a knife-edge contest in the battleground state of Michigan, where many Arab American voters have voiced anger over the White House’s support for Israel’s conduct of the war.Democrat strategists harbour fears that discontent over Gaza could result in Kamala Harris, the vice-president and party nominee, losing the state to Donald Trump in the 5 November poll.The letter complains of delays to US-funded aid at crossing points into Gaza and says the flow of assistance into the war-devastated territory has dropped by more than 50% since Israel promised last March to allow more deliveries.“We are particularly concerned that recent actions by the Israeli government … are contributing to an accelerated deterioration in the conditions in Gaza,” it says.White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that the letter was not intended as a threat, but “was simply meant to reiterate the sense of urgency we feel and the seriousness with which we feel it, about the need for an increase, a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance”.After an uptick in assistance following communications between the US and Israel in March and April, aid volumes entering the strip in September fell to their lowest level, Blinken and Austin wrote, since last October, when Israel launched a massive military offensive in retaliation for an attack by Hamas that killed about 1,200 Israelis, and led to more than 250 being taken hostage.“To reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory and consistent with its assurances to us, Israel must, starting now and within 30 days, act” on a series of specific steps, including letting in at least 350 aid trucks daily and instituting humanitarian pauses to Israeli military activity.The letter adds: “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measure may have implications for US policy under NSM-20 and relevant US law.”NSM-20 refers to a memorandum issued by the White House national security council, which allows for “appropriate next steps” if a country receiving US military aid is deemed by the state department or the Pentagon not to be meeting prior assurances of allowing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.“Such remediation could include actions from refreshing the assurances to suspending any further transfers of defense articles or, as appropriate, defense services,” the memorandum states.Congressional Republicans have called on the White House to revoke NSM-20 calling it “redundant” and dismissing it as aimed at “placat[ing] critics of security assistance to our vital ally Israel”.Other relevant legislation that could be invoked include section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act and the Leahy Act, which preclude the US government from providing military assistance or selling arms to countries that restrict humanitarian aid or violate human rights.Miller, the state department spokesperson, declined to go into specific when asked what consequences Israel might face for refusing to meet American demands for greater aid access.He said that a previous letter Blinken had written in April had increased humanitarian aid flows. An Israeli official confirmed that the latest letter had been received but did not discuss the details, the Associated Press reported.Miller also said that Blinken had seen footages showing at least one Palestinian burned alive after an Israeli strike set tents ablaze outside a Gaza hospital.“We all saw that video, and all know that it’s horrifying to see people burned to death. We have made clear our serious concerns about the matter directly with the government of Israel.”The US has made repeated exhortations to allow increased aid into the enclave, but Netanyahu has frequently ignored such entreaties to moderate its conduct of the war in Gaza.Last week, UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said that the three hospitals still operating in northern Gaza face “dire shortages” of fuel, medicine and blood, while food supplies are dwindling.Israeli authorities facilitated just one of 54 UN attempts to get aid to north Gaza this month, Dujarric said. Eighty-five percent of the requests were denied, with the rest impeded or canceled for logistical or security reasons.Israel insists that much of the aid has dual-use capacity that could help Hamas fighters and also says it has been subject to looting.More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and the majority of buildings in Gaza destroyed or badly damaged in Israel’s yearlong offensive with the stated aim of rooting out Hamas.The Pentagon described the letter as “private correspondence” and declined to discuss it in detail. More

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      ‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza

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      That the Trump campaign would open an office in Hamtramck, a tiny city of around 28,000 people north of downtown Detroit, less than a month before the election, speaks to a particular curiosity of the 2024 presidential race.About 40% of Hamtramck’s residents are of Middle Eastern or north African descent, 60% are believed to be Muslim Americans, and the city has an all-Muslim city council.Last week, as Israel was expanding its war into Lebanon and continuing its daily bombardment of Gaza, scores of locals – many immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab- and Muslim-majority countries – lined Joseph Campau Avenue to attend the official opening of Trump’s office.“Peace in the Middle East will not happen under a Harris administration – she’s too weak,” said Barry Altman, a Republican party candidate who is running for a seat in Michigan’s house of representatives next month, and who was running the new Trump campaign office on a recent afternoon. “Trump is the only hope for peace.”Altman is not alone. Last month, Amer Ghalib, the Democratic mayor of Hamtramck, announced his endorsement of Donald Trump after meeting the former president at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where the pair spoke for about 20 minutes.In past elections, Arab Americans were a solidly Democratic voting bloc, especially in the years following 9/11 and given Trump’s overtly anti-Muslim rhetoric. But with Kamala Harris reportedly “underwater” in Michigan – now three points behind Trump among likely voters, having led the former president by five points as recently as last month, according to one recent poll – Muslim and Arab American communities across Michigan could play a major role in the outcome of the presidential election.View image in fullscreenAngry with the Biden administration – and, by extension, Kamala Harris – for its support for Israel, Arab Americans may be willing to overlook Trump’s history of closeness with Israel’s hard-right leaders. “If, and when, they say, when I’m president, the US will once again be stronger and closer [to Israel] than it ever was,” he said last week. “I will support Israel’s right to win its war.”Yet national polls show Arab Americans slightly favoring the former president; others are increasingly vocal in support of the Green party’s Jill Stein.While Hamtramck may not sway a national election all by itself, it offers a window into how many Muslim and Arab Americans feel about their political leaders, as Israel’s war on Gaza enters a second year and spreads into Lebanon.Hamtramck aside, Macomb and Oakland counties, north of downtown Detroit, are home to an estimated 140,000 people – around 45% of Michigan’s entire Arab American community, which numbers more than 300,000.Previous elections show that voting in these counties historically runs very close.In 2020, Trump won 53% of the Macomb county vote, a community that is home to an estimated 65,000-80,000 Arab Americans. Even within Macomb county, voters are divided: Trump won Sterling Heights, a city home to a large Iraqi Chaldean community, by 11%, while Biden won Warren, a neighboring city, by 14%.Next door in Oakland county, a largely suburban community that’s home to around 60,000 people who identify as Arab American, Biden won 56% of the vote four years ago.But over the past year, Biden and Harris have been repeatedly rebuked by Michigan’s Arab and Muslim communities. Earlier this year, a number of community leaders refused to meet with Democratic campaign officials rather than Biden administration representatives to discuss the war in Gaza. Weeks later, more than 100,000 people in Michigan voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries in a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy.View image in fullscreenDespite initial cautious optimism, Biden’s replacement by Harris at the top of the ticket hasn’t much changed this picture, especially as the Middle East has grown more volatile.“Harris made it very clear that she wanted to continue funding the state of Israel,” said Hassan Abdel Salam, the director of the Abandon Harris campaign, at a press conference in Dearborn on Wednesday to officially endorse Jill Stein for president.Harris has maintained her stance on Israel’s right to defend itself and has largely ignored the conditions laid out by the uncommitted movement, which declined to endorse her (but has forcefully come out against Trump). A poll by the Arab American Institute has Harris 18 points below Biden’s 2020 level of support among Arab Americans.“We know that we have 40,000 voters just in Dearborn. They are highly persuadable to our cause, and we believe fundamentally that if they come out to vote, they will vote against Harris,” said Abdel Salam.View image in fullscreen“The former president prevented our families, our friends, our colleagues from entering the country,” he continued, referring to Trump’s 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. “But the vice-president killed them.”Trump’s visit to Detroit on Thursday marks the 11th time the former president has come to the state. Harris, for her part, has campaigned here five times.Four years ago, Hamtramck voters overwhelmingly backed Biden, with the president winning 86% of the vote. One of them was Muhammad Hashim, who emigrated to the US from Bangladesh more than three decades ago and today runs a grocery store catering to the south Asian community in the heart of Hamtramck.But the Democrats won’t get his vote this time around.“Biden messed up the country, he’s really not good for the middle class. We’re struggling to survive and today we don’t get any help,” he says.He hopes that Trump, on the other hand, uses his business acumen to bring down the cost of the products he sells in his store, many of which are imported from overseas. “Trump is not perfect, but we have no choice,” he says.Hashim’s other major concern is Gaza, where more than 42,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks. “The No 1 reason [to not vote for Harris] is that she is supporting Israel 100%,” he said.Hamtramck is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country and is the first in the US to have an all-Muslim city council.Still, even as Hamtramck’s mayor has come out in favor of Trump, residents and other local leaders say that doesn’t necessarily represent the whole community. Several Hamtramck city leaders are attempting to mobilize support for Harris. In recent weeks, dozens of prominent Muslim leaders have endorsed Harris, as has Emgage Action, a Muslim voter-registration group. On 3 October, a group established to activate Arab American supporters for the Harris-Walz ticket nationwide was announced.“We are in a moment where our community is suffering and hurting in more ways than we can count. We have also seen four years under a Trump presidency and what that did to our community, and the risks that come with that,” said a spokesperson for Arab Americans for Harris-Walz. “We’re not saying that with a Harris administration there is no risk, but under a Trump administration, the risk is much higher. We believe [backing Harris] is a more favorable path forward for us here in the United States and in our home countries.”Meanwhile in Hamtramck, outside the new Trump campaign office, Altman, a pastor who says he was an independent until last year, invites high school students inside for a bottle of pop. He hands them Trump flyers and literature from his own campaign and tells them to share them with their parents. More

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      Time is running out for Kamala Harris to break with Biden on the Gaza catastrophe | Moira Donegan

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      In an appearance this week on the daytime talkshow The View, Kamala Harris was asked how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said. The comment was seized on by the Trump campaign, who have used it in an attempt to seize upon Biden’s unpopularity and blame Harris for the issues that seem to most enrage and terrify their supporters, among them high consumer prices and immigration. But the comment also rankled some members of Harris’s own base: namely, the young, progressive and non-white voters who have been distraught over the suffering inflicted by Israel in its US-backed war on Gaza.If Harris can’t think of any way she would differ from Biden, these voters may have some suggestions for her. The Biden approach to Israel, after all, has been disastrous on multiple fronts. It has been a moral catastrophe, with Israel’s wildly disproportionate campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza leading to famine, plague and tens of thousands of deaths. It has been an electoral liability, alienating Muslim and Arab American voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan and depressing turnout among the young voters whom Democrats have long relied on and which were a crucial part of Biden’s 2020 victory.And it has been a complete strategic failure, with Israel now expanding its war into Lebanon, the region on the brink of a large-scale conflict between American and Iranian proxies, and the whole world watching as American leaders fail to exert any meaningful pressure or discernible consequences on a small country that has used a great number of US weapons while completely ignoring US instruction.There was a moment, earlier in the war, when things could have gone differently. After the 7 October 2023 attacks killed hundreds of innocent Israelis, the Biden administration reportedly urged caution. But it was only in February, some four months into the war, when much of Gaza had already been leveled and its hundreds of thousands of people displaced into the south, that the Biden White House attempted to stop the Israelis from invading Rafah, the small southern border city where the refugees had fled, by delaying a shipment of 2,000lb bombs.The move had broad support: Nancy Pelosi, hardly a robust supporter of the Palestinian cause, was by then urging enforceable conditions on aid to Israel. The move would also have had the benefit of bringing the Biden administration’s actions more plausibly into line with American and international law, which compels that states not sell arms to armies, like Israel’s, that have likely committed war crimes.It was, to say the least, a mild gesture, and not one that had any impact at all on Israel’s military readiness: all told, America has sent more than 10,000 such bombs to Israel over the past year, many of which have been dropped on Gaza. By the time the Biden administration even so much as dawdled in sending military support to Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been massacred. But reportedly, the anger that this small act of non-compliance provoked among Israeli officials and the American pro-Israel lobby was so intense that the Biden administration got spooked.No meaningful conditions have been imposed on military aid since, and Israel has openly flouted American efforts to de-escalate, continuing its brutal assault on Gaza, launching an invasion into Lebanon that has displaced approximately 1 million people, and attempting to provoke Iran into an outright war – which, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government seems to believe, America will fight on Israel’s behalf. Meanwhile, the whole world watches on, with every foreign leader around the globe seeing anew each day the bleak reality of diminished American power: the United States, the Gaza war has proved, neither keeps its promises nor follows through on its threats.But for all that the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war has been devastating and embarrassing internationally, it has also been unpopular domestically, creating real electoral dangers for the Harris campaign. The protests that sprang up across American campuses last spring were not merely the venting of a fringe minority; they represented a large-scale mobilization of young people morally outraged by the images coming out of Gaza.These young voters view the Biden administration as complicit in a genocide; for Democrats to assume that this belief is insincere, or that those who hold them will overcome such a grave moral objection and turn out to vote for Harris anyway, seems both entitled and unwise.Early in her campaign, Harris seemed to understand this. She refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when he came to Washington this summer, and she had strong words for the Israeli prime minister when they spoke together at a news conference. Harris also made positive rhetorical gestures towards the plight of Palestinians, saying kind words in her convention speech about the injustice of their suffering and their right to self-determination. But for the most part, that’s all these moves were – words. Now, Harris has mostly stopped saying them.Voters have noticed. Specifically, Arab American voters in Michigan have. In February, when Michigan held its Democratic primary, more than 100,000 primary voters cast “uncommitted” ballots, as part of a protest movement aimed at pressuring Biden to change his stance on Gaza. The uncommitted votes were several times greater in number than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state. That discontent has not gone away. A recent national poll of Arab American voters found Trump leading by more than four points among the group, which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the last cycle. This may have a particularly potent impact in Michigan, where a new Quinnipiac poll released last week found Harris trailing Trump by three points.Harris may not want to place much daylight between herself and the incumbent she has served as vice-president. But she has an opportunity to break with Biden on Gaza in these last months of the campaign – to show strength and resolve internationally, to show deference to the interests of a key voter group, and to do the right thing. For all the tendency to cast Israel as a global exception, the truth is that Netanyahu’s style of governance – his bigotry, his corruption, his advancement of a violent and exclusionary nationalism – is part of a broader trend of far-right authoritarianism.It is the same trend that Harris aims to defeat in her campaign against Donald Trump. She has presented herself as a candidate on a mission to revive the liberal order, to protect democracy, to remake America into a country worthy of its global power, and to embody the principles of courage, justice and equality that make leaders worthy of following. She has a chance to show that she means it.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Just Over the Border from Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines

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      Israel’s military showed journalists parts of what it said was Hezbollah’s deeply entrenched military infrastructure across the border in southern Lebanon.We had entered southern Lebanon early Sunday afternoon in a convoy of armored vehicles through a gap punched by Israeli forces in the snaking border wall.A rustic nature trail in a forest of thorny trees and thickets led to a small clearing. Here, in the western sector of southern Lebanon, about 300 yards north of the border with Israel, Israeli forces showed us what they described as a secret military outpost of Hezbollah’s, equipped with large amounts of explosives and mines.The outpost was the second of two sites that the Israeli military showed to international journalists during a supervised visit to the area, two weeks after Israel invaded southern Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah. The sites were in a sparsely populated, leafy mountainous area near the Mediterranean coast that it now controls.At the outpost, the Israelis had displayed the mines, as well as a metal chest marked “Explosive,” with English and Russian writing and numbers, containing ammunition. Boots, helmets, a solar panel charger and other gear were also on display. According to the military officials at the scene, the small dugout had room for about 10 fighters — an explosives team, they said, whose mission was to blow a gap in the concrete border wall.The stated aim of Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon was to degrade the military capabilities of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, and to push its fighters further north. Israel has not said how far into Lebanon its forces will advance or how long they will stay.Military officials on the ground said they were surprised at the extent of Hezbollah’s entrenchment in forward positions a short walk north of the border wall — evidence, they said, that Hezbollah had made meticulous preparations to carry out its long-threatened plan to invade northern Israel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israeli Jets Pummel Hezbollah Targets in Southern Lebanon

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      Sirens sounded in northern Israel, warning of incoming fire from Hezbollah.Israel’s air force pounded targets in Lebanon as its soldiers clashed with Hezbollah militants in the southern part of the country, the military said on Sunday. Lebanon’s government said that at least 23 people had been killed over the past 24 hours.The Lebanese Red Cross said overnight that it was responding to a “major strike” in the southern city of Nabatieh, posting an image on social media that showed flames and rubble. Lebanon’s civil defense said on Sunday morning one person had been killed and four others wounded.The civil defense also said its teams had completed a search and rescue operation shortly before dawn after an attack a day earlier on the town of Al-Maaysra in the central Keserwan district. It said that 17 people — including two women and three children — had been killed and 12 others wounded. The Health Ministry listed a series of other attacks in which it said that at least six people had been killed and dozens of others injured since Saturday.On Sunday morning, the Israeli military said that its jets had hit around “200 Hezbollah targets deep in Lebanon and southern Lebanon” over the past day as part of its multipronged fight against the Iranian-backed militant group.Hezbollah started firing on northern Israel in solidarity with its ally Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks last year, setting off back-and-forth exchanges of fire that displaced communities on both sides of the border. Israel, which is also fighting in Gaza against Hamas, stepped up its bombardment in recent weeks before invading southern Lebanon with ground troops.The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion have killed at least 2,000 people and caused significant destruction and forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee their homes. Aid agencies have warned it is compounding a humanitarian crisis prompted by the war in Gaza.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More