Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he ordered the IDF to “hit the gas,” striking Hezbollah, noting that the military had already killed “more than 600 Hezbollah terrorists in the last few weeks.”<\/p>\n
“We will hit them. That’s right, they are shooting drones at us, fiber drones. We have a dedicated team working on that, and we will resolve it as well. In the meantime, you are showing resilience,” Netanyahu said, adding that he wanted to “congratulate the residents of the north for a resilience that inspires all of us.”<\/p>\n
“But what this requires of us now is to increase the blows, to increase the force. We will hit them on the shin and thigh,” he concluded.<\/p>\n
The prime minister’s comments come hours after multiple sources confirmed to The Jerusalem Post that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir<\/a> said Israel should attack Beirut in response to Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon during a Security Cabinet meeting.<\/p>\n Zamir arrived at the meeting after visiting Israel’s Northern Command on Sunday, where he conducted a situational assessment and approved operational plans for continued fighting against Hezbollah.<\/p>\n Later, he visited the 401st Brigade and was present at the brigade’s headquarters when Sgt. Nehoray Leizer<\/a> was killed by an explosive drone.<\/p>\n A US official told the Post that “Hezbollah has ignored repeated requests to stop firing at Israel, including a recent ultimatum. Israel will never be expected to passively absorb attacks on its forces and civilians. This is not the Biden administration. The status quo is untenable.”<\/p>\n “We must put an end to the threat of Hezbollah’s explosive drones,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a Monday statement. “For every explosive drone, ten buildings in Beirut should fall.”<\/p>\n “A strategic threat is not answered by defense alone, but by changing the rules and the equation,” he added, pointing out the recent NIS 2 billion defense budget<\/a> he had approved to address the ongoing drone threat.\u00a0<\/p>\n National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed Smotrich’s sentiment in a Monday post to X\/Twitter.<\/p>\n