Live updates: Netanyahu and Biden to speak ahead of Iran attack; Israeli leader warns Lebanon of destruction like Gaza

Hezbollah has said that its fighters have targeted Israeli forces again in southern Lebanon after earlier clashes at a border village.

Hezbollah fighters targeted “an Israeli infantry force that tried to advance towards the Labbouneh area with a guided missile, causing casualties among them, including deaths and injuries,” the Iran-backed militant group said. It had earlier claimed to have repelled Israeli soldiers around Labbouneh.

Hezbollah also said that its fighters bombed Israeli troops in “Mais al-Jabal with artillery shells,” and fired rockets “during an infiltration attempt by Israeli enemy infantry forces in Ras Al-Naqoura toward Al-Mushrifa.”

Leaders from Islamist group Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement discussed plans for cooperation after the war in Gaza in a new round of talks in Cairo today, a Hamas official told Reuters.

The talks are the first since the two groups met in China in July and agreed steps to form a Palestinian unity government for Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

They are also part of long-running and previously unsuccessful efforts to heal a schism that hardened when Hamas seized control of Gaza in a brief conflict with Fatah in 2007.

Turkish passport holders gather near a hotel on Beirut’s waterfront, ahead of their evacuation from Lebanon by Turkish Naval vessels today.

Israel’s prime minister is warning Lebanon that it will face “destruction and suffering” like Gaza unless its people rise up against Hezbollah. Meanwhile, President Biden is scheduled to speak with Netanyahu for the first time since August.

Two people have died in northern Israel this morning after Hezbollah targeted the area with rocket attacks, Israeli authorities have said.

The Israeli police said a man and a woman were found “mortally wounded” in the area of Kiryat Shmona and pronounced dead a short time ago.

They said the bodies were found after reports were received about fragments of rockets falling in the area. It was not immediately clear exactly how the two died, though the IDF had said earlier that “approximately 20 projectile launches were identified crossing from Lebanon.” 

Police urged Israelis to avoid entering areas where rocket fragments may have fallen and not to “approach or touch the remains of rockets that may contain explosive material” and to report any findings to local authorities.

The Israel Defense Forces continues to target Hezbollah in villages in southern Lebanon, Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee said in a statement on X today, issuing new evacuation warnings that have covered one quarter of the country.

He ordered the residents not to return to their homes in the south until further notice, saying that doing so will put their own lives in danger.

The IDF has ramped up its assault of the south in recent days, increasingly issuing warnings for villages and towns in the south and the east.

Fears have grown over Israel’s plans for its invasion of Lebanon after Netanyahu issued a warning last night calling on Lebanese people to rise up against Hezbollah if they don’t want to face the possibility of the destruction seen in Gaza.

Still, Hisham Karameh, a salesperson at a clothing store, said he “laughed when I heard about Netanyahu’s threats.”

“This is not the first time,” Karameh, 28, told NBC News, noting Israel’s past invasions of Lebanon, including its 1982 invasion which resulted in a nearly two-decade occupation of the country’s south.

Other residents said they did not need “lectures” from the Israeli leader.

“Even though I agree with all that he said, we don’t need lectures from him about how to behave and what to do,” said Marie Khalil, a schoolteacher. “We do not support Hezbollah, but looking at all the Israeli criminal actions, I can’t trust his intentions. Let him go face Iran and Syria that are after our destruction.”

Rouba Sleiman, a housewife, agreed, saying there was “no need to remind us. We are already against Hezbollah and what it did to us and to its people. We also don’t want Israel to invade our country.”

Iran’s top military commander, Esmail Qaani, is in “good health” and will soon receive a military medal from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a senior adviser has said, according to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency.

Qaani’s fate has been the subject of intense speculation as he has not been seen in public since reportedly traveling to Beirut. Iranian officials have in recent days sought to dismiss suggestions he may have been killed in an Israeli strike.

Qaani succeeded slain commander Qassem Soleimani as the leader of the Quds force, the overseas intelligence wing of the Iranian paramilitary force IRGC.

At least six people were injured in a stabbing attack in the northern city of Hadera, Israeli police said, adding it occurred at four different locations.

“The attacker has been neutralized, and this is confirmed as a terror attack,” a police spokesperson said. “It is suspected that another suspect fled the scene on a scooter,” the police added.

An overnight Israeli airstrike on what appeared to be a residential building in south Beirut left piles of smoking debris. Thousands of Lebanese people have left the area amid Israeli warnings and sustained bombardment.

President Joe Biden is expected to speak with Netanyahu by phone today, an Israeli official and a U.S. official have told NBC News.

The Israeli official earlier said that Netanyahu had called off his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s trip to the U.S. because the Israeli leader wanted a conversation with Biden and because the Israeli Cabinet is due to vote on the response to the Iranian missile attack.

This would be the first call between the U.S. and Israeli leaders since Aug. 21.

NBC News just witnessed multiple interceptions from our balcony in Haifa.

The IDF said that sirens had sounded in the northern port city, a day after Hezbollah fired more than 130 rockets at the area.

Hezbollah said it repelled two attempted incursions by the Israeli military in southern Lebanon early today.

The Iran-backed militant group said it targeted an IDF unit that was attempting to advance toward the western village of Labbouneh with artillery and rocket weapons and achieved direct hits, “which led to its retreat.”

Hezbollah fighters also detonated an explosive device and clashed with Israeli soldiers “when they attempted to infiltrate the town of Blida,” in the east, it said.

The IDF has not commented on the claims.

Displaced families at Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut this morning. Lebanese government figures suggest that more than 180,000 internally displaced people are currently living in approved shelters, but many have been forced to live on the street as a result of Israel’s invasion.

Israel’s yearlong assault of the Gaza Strip has now killed more than 42,000 people, health authorities in the besieged enclave said today.

At least 45 people were killed in just the last 24 hours, the Health Ministry said, adding that a number of the victims were still stuck under the rubble with emergency responders unable to reach them.

Another nearly 98,000 people have been injured in the past year, it said.

A renewed Israeli operation in northern Gaza has forced evacuations again of those who had returned to their homes after months of assault. At least 400,000 people are now “trapped” in the area with no safe place to flee, Philippe Lazzarini, chief of UNRWA, the U.N. agency in Gaza, said in a post on X today.

“No end to hell,” he wrote, as “recent evacuation orders from the Israeli Authorities are forcing people to flee again & again, especially from Jabalia Camp.”

“Many are refusing because they know too well that no place anywhere in Gaza is safe,” he said, as refugee shelters and services are shutting down. Hunger is also spreading, he said, and the new operation is threatening a polio vaccination drive for children.

Hezbollah officials are no longer demanding a truce in Gaza as a condition for reaching a cease-fire in Lebanon, rowing back from an oft-repeated promise to keep fighting until Israel halts its offensive against Hezbollah’s Iran-backed ally Hamas.

Ever since Hezbollah began launching missiles across Lebanon’s border a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel, Hezbollah officials have consistently said they would not stop until Israel ended the war in Gaza.

But Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hezbollah, broke that link in a televised speech on Tuesday, even as he promised to continue to stand with Hamas and Palestinians in their battle with Israel. Two days earlier, two lower-ranking Hezbollah officials had also talked about a Lebanon truce without making a linkage with Gaza.

Clouds of smoke rise from several Israeli air strikes targeting the southern Lebanese village of Khiam this morning.

The State Department said it was inappropriate for Israeli soldiers to raise their flag in southern Lebanon, where the IDF has ordered the evacuation of dozens of villages.

“It’s obviously inappropriate for Israeli soldiers to take that step, and we would look to them to comply with what they have said, which these are limited incursions, not with the goal of holding territory,” spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters last night.

The Israeli flag was planted in Maroun Al-Ras, a village in southern Lebanon. NBC News was able to verify the photos through geolocation of the area.

The United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon said earlier this week that the IDF was operating near one of its outposts in Maroun Al-Ras, adding that the Israeli operations put the security of peacekeepers at risk. Satellite images had confirmed the presence of Israeli tanks.

As the world waits for Israel’s expected retaliation against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a video message to the people of Lebanon in which he called on them to “free your country of Hezbollah.”