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dozens in the Zionist entity. The exchanges of fire have forced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border to flee their homes.

Nasrallah vowed to keep up Hezbollah’s fight against the Zionist entity until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached. “The Lebanese front will not stop until the aggression on Gaza stops” despite “all this blood spilt”, he said. Nasrallah addressed Zionist officials’ promises to return to their homes thousands of displaced Zionists. “You will not be able to return the people of the north to the north,” he said, warning that “no military escalation, no killings, no assassinations and no all-out war can return residents to the border”. The “only way” to return the displaced to the north is to “stop the war on Gaza,” he said.

Nasrallah said Hezbollah hoped Zionist troops would enter southern Lebanon because that would create a “historic opportunity” for the Iran-backed group. On Thursday, the Zionist military said it struck six Hezbollah “infrastructure sites” and a weapons storage facility overnight in southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the militant group. Lebanon’s official National News Agency also reported Zionist strikes and shelling on several towns in the south.

“Yes, we received a big and harsh blow, but this is also the nature of war,” Nasrallah said. “We know that our enemy has superiority on the technological level and we have never said otherwise.” Hezbollah said 25 of its members had been killed following the explosions, with a source close to the group saying at least 20 had died when their walkie-talkies detonated.

The Zionist entity will face “a crushing response from the axis of resistance”, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Commander Hossein Salami told Nasrallah on Thursday according to state media. Two Zionist soldiers were killed in combat on Thursday near the border with Lebanon, the Zionist military said. N12 News said one of them was killed by a drone and the other by an anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah across the Lebanese border.

Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security” was a dangerous development that could “signal a wider war”. Its prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged the United Nations to oppose the Zionist entity’s “technological war” on the country, ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the exploding devices attack. Iran’s envoy to the UN said his country “reserves the right to take retaliatory measures” after its ambassador in Beirut was wounded in the blasts.

The White House, which is pressing to salvage efforts for an elusive ceasefire deal to end the Gaza war, warned all sides against “an escalation of any kind”. “We don’t believe that the way to solve where we’re at in this crisis is by additional military operations at all,” said US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby.

The Zionist military offensive has killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, most of them civilians. In Gaza on Wednesday, the civil defense agency said a Zionist strike on a school-turned-shelter killed five people.

In Lebanon, the influx of so many casualties following the blasts overwhelmed medics. “What happened in the last two days is so frightening. It’s terrifying,” Lina Ismail told AFP by phone from the eastern city of Baalbek where some of the explosions occurred. “We were so scared that we dismantled the inverter (a component inside solar energy systems) and turned off the device,” she said. “I took away my daughter’s power bank and we even sleep with our mobile phones in a separate room,” she added in a trembling voice.

Analysts said operatives had likely planted explosives on the pagers before they were delivered to Hezbollah. The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation found the pagers had been booby-trapped, a security official said. “Data indicates the devices were pre-programmed to detonate and contained explosive materials planted next to the battery,” the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, said the pagers were recently imported and appeared to have been “sabotaged at source”. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the pagers that exploded were produced by the Hungary-based BAC Consulting on behalf of Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. It cited intelligence officers as saying BAC was part of a Zionist front. A government spokesman in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary”. — Agencies

Japanese firm Icom said it had stopped producing the model of radios reportedly used in Wednesday’s blasts in Lebanon around 10 years ago. – Agencies