by Emmitt Barry, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – Amid intense fighting in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, Israeli Air Force fighter jets tested the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon on Saturday with strikes targeting infrastructure in Syria near a border crossing with Lebanon. Israel stated the site was “actively” being used by Hezbollah for weapons transfers.
Israel conducted multiple strikes across Lebanon and Syria, citing violations of the ceasefire agreement.
“The IDF will continue to act to remove any threat to the State of Israel that violates the terms of the ceasefire agreement,” the military stated.
The IDF accused Hezbollah, with backing from the Syrian regime, of exploiting civilian border crossings to smuggle weapons into Lebanon. Amid the ceasefire, Israel has pledged to block all weapon transfers to Hezbollah.
Amid escalating unrest in Syria, Israeli strikes coincided with a major rebel offensive in Aleppo, where insurgents seized territory and clashed fiercely with government forces for a second day, according to both government and opposition sources.
The Aleppo offensive was launched on the same day a ceasefire began between Hezbollah, a Syrian ally, and Israel. It marked the largest attack since March 2020, when Russia, backing Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Turkey, supporting the rebels, brokered a ceasefire that halted years of conflict displacing millions opposed to Assad’s rule.
Syria’s armed forces reported Thursday that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which controls much of northwest Syria, launched an ongoing offensive targeting several villages and military bases.
Designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Turkey, HTS has been repeatedly targeted by Syrian government and Russian forces. Once known as the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, HTS has rebranded multiple times in an effort to distance itself from its al-Qaeda origins.
Copyright 1999-2024 Worthy News. This article was originally published on Worthy News and was reproduced with permission.
More Worthy News
Christians gathered in Indonesia on Thursday to pray for survivors and families of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami 20 years ago that killed some 230,000 people and left deep scarves in the lives of those who were there.
The US-based Eastern European Mission (EEM) Bible distribution ministry recently reported that, amid the continuing devastating war against Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have requested an increasing number of Bibles to be sent to be delivered in their language, The Christian Post (CP) reports.
A bus carrying dozens of people veered off the road, landing in a lake in Norway and killing several people, authorities say.
Hundreds of Christians in Syria took to the streets of Damascus on Tuesday to protest the destruction of a Christmas tree in the Christian-majority town of Suqaylabiyah, near Hama, Politico reports. The tree was burned down just over two weeks after the ousting of President Bashar al-Assad by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamic insurgent group on December 8.
Five journalists of a television station linked to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a group designated as a “terrorist organization” by Israel, were killed Thursday in an Israeli air strike on their vehicle in Gaza, the network said.
An increasing number of mass graves are being discovered in Syria since the brutal rule of dictator Bashar al-Assad came to an end at the hands of the Islamic insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) on December 8, TRT reports. Last week, an international war crimes prosecutor said the mass grave sites in Syria show Assad had operated the “machinery of death” against anyone he considered an enemy.
Sudanese civilians are dealing with famine in addition to the death, displacement, maiming, and trauma brought on them by the war for power between Sudan’s National Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that broke out in April 2023, Courthouse News reports.