The Israeli military said 30 projectiles were launched from Lebanon, with most of them intercepted.
With Israel on high alert anticipating major military action from Tehran-aligned armed groups including Hezbollah and Hamas, medics and police said two people were killed on Sunday in a stabbing attack in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The assailant, a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank, was "neutralised" by police and taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Israeli first responders scrub blood stains at the scene of a reported stabbing attack near Tel Aviv © GIL COHEN-MAGEN / AFP
Israeli forces meanwhile kept bombarding the Gaza Strip, witnesses and officials in the besieged Hamas-ruled territory said, with no end in sight to the nearly 10-month war triggered by the Palestinian militant group's October 7 attack on southern Israel.
France, Canada and Jordan were among the latest governments to issue calls for their citizens to leave Lebanon.
"In a highly volatile security context", French nationals were "urgently asked" to avoid travelling to Lebanon, and those already in the country "to make their arrangements now to leave... as soon as possible", the foreign ministry in Paris said.
The United States and Britain have issued similar warnings.
Several Western airlines have suspended flights to the region.
A Palestinan woman carrying a child weeps following a strike that hit tents at a central Gaza hospital courtyard © Eyad BABA / AFP
On Sunday Qatar Airways said that "in light of recent developments in Lebanon", the Doha-Beirut route "will operate exclusively during daylight hours" at least until Monday.
The killing Wednesday of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, hours after the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah's military chief in Beirut, has triggered vows of vengeance from Iran and the so-called "axis of resistance" of Tehran-backed armed groups.
Israel, accused by Hamas, Iran and others of carrying out the attack that killed Haniyeh, has not directly commented on it.
- Tents for displaced hit -
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for its unprecedented October 7 attack which resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Palestinians inspect the rubble following Israeli bombardment of a school complex in Gaza City, on Saturday © Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP
Israel's campaign against Hamas has killed at least 39,550 people in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.
Haniyeh, Hamas's political chief, was the group's lead negotiator in efforts to end the war.
His killing raised questions about the continued viability of efforts by Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators to broker a truce and exchange of hostages and prisoners.
On the ground in Gaza, fighting continued on Sunday.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said eight bodies had been recovered from a residential building in north Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli air strike.
The aftermath of an overnight strike that hit tents used as temporary shelters by displaced Palestinians in central Gaza © Eyad BABA / AFP
Medics at central Gaza's Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital said at least five people were killed and 16 wounded in an Israeli drone strike on tents housing displaced Palestinians at the medical complex, with a separate attack on a house nearby in the same area killing three.
On Saturday, an Israeli strike on a school turned displacement shelter killed at least 17 people, the civil defence agency said. Israel said the facility was used by militants.
An AFP correspondent reported Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling early Sunday in and around Gaza City, while witnesses said there was more shelling, gunfire and at least two air strikes on the territory's south.
The Israeli military said its air forces had struck "approximately 50 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip" in the past 24 hours.
- War 'without constraints' -
Israeli anti-government protesters rally calling for a hostage release deal, in the coastal city of Haifa © Oren Ziv / AFP
Israeli ally the United States said it would move warships and fighter jets to the region to protect US personnel and defend Israel.
Analysts have told AFP that a joint but measured action from Iran and its allies was likely, while Tehran said it expects Hezbollah to hit deeper inside Israel and no longer be confined to military targets.
US President Joe Biden, asked by reporters if he thought Iran would stand down, said: "I hope so. I don't know."
On Sunday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi will visit Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart, his ministry said.
Haniyeh's killing "has brought the Middle East to its moment of greatest peril in years", the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank said in a report issued on Saturday.
"The risk of a spiralling conflagration is high," with the potential for a miscalculation that would trigger a war "without constraints... likely greater now than it was in April", it added.
On April 13, Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israeli soil, firing a barrage of drones and missiles -- most of which were intercepted -- after a strike killed Revolutionary Guards at Tehran's consulate in Damascus.
The ICG said that securing "a long overdue ceasefire" in Gaza was "the best way of meaningfully reducing tensions in the region".
Hamas officials but also some analysts as well as protesters in Israel have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war to safeguard his ruling hard-right coalition.
On Sunday, Netanyahu told his cabinet he was "making every effort" to return the hostages and was prepared "to go a long way" to do so.
Daemon Targaryen, played by Matt Smith, finds himself in the middle of an internecine struggle between two warring families.
Ollie Upton/HBO
David Routt, University of Richmond
Students in my medieval history courses often wonder whether historical reality can be gleaned from medieval cinematic fantasy.
I tell them that fantasy does not aspire to historical verisimilitude. But it can reflect medieval conflicts, values and norms.
The first season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” exemplified this. Its narrative, as noted by co-creator George R. R. Martin, drew inspiration from England’s Anarchy, a 12th-century civil war sparked by King Henry I’s effort to make his daughter, the Empress Matilda, a ruling queen. King Viserys of Martin’s fictional Westeros does the same with his daughter Rhaenyra. This fantasy evoked the vagaries of hereditary succession and the misogyny characteristic of the Middle Ages.
The new season offers a more colorful medieval palette. Its themes of internecine strife, justice and the power of everyday people have broad – indeed, universal – resonance.
One conflict encapsulates the factional violence in fictional Westeros.
The feud between the Brackens and Blackwoods, two noble families, is a storyline in both seasons.
During Princess Rhaenyra’s tour to find a husband in Season One, one of her suitors, a member of the Blackwood family, slays a heckler in her presence who happens to be a Bracken.
‘House of the Dragon’ co-creator George R. R. Martin pulled from medieval Europe to create his fictional world.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO
It represents the newest broadside in an escalating cycle of retribution, with the dispute’s origins long purged from memory. As one character observes, the spark igniting the Bracken-Blackwood feud “is lost in time. A sin begets a sin begets a sin.”
No slight is deemed too trivial in the age-old hostility between these two families: At one point, the Blackwoods accuse the Brackens of moving a boundary stone to purloin grazing land, and this accusation somehow reaches King Viserys’ ears, who dismisses it as a local problem.
In Season Two, bands of Bracken and Blackwood youths meet in the disputed pasture. Hotheaded invective follows: A Bracken calls a Blackwood a “babe-killer” and “kin-slayer.” A battle ensues, resulting in a pasture littered with Bracken and Blackwood corpses, the Blackwood patriarch dead, too.
The Brackens’ victory proves ephemeral.
The surviving Blackwoods offer arms to Princess Rhaenyra’s husband, Daemon, in return for aid in assailing the Brackens. The Brackens are unmoved by the threat of carnage that Daemon can unleash on them with his fire-breathing dragon, so Daemon urges the Blackwoods to perpetrate atrocities. They do: looting and destroying sacred shrines, burning crops, seizing livestock, slaughtering peasants and abducting women and children.
Westeros’ intractable factional hatreds echo elements of the medieval experience.
When Germanic kingdoms emerged in the early years of the Middle Ages, they lacked institutions for maintaining order, such as a standing police force and sophisticated judicial institutions and procedures.
In these kingdoms, the victim of a crime could personally and legitimately impose rough justice on a suspected culprit. This could invite retaliation and spark cyclic, long-term hostilities, though the threat of a feud could also lead to a settlement of a dispute without resort to violence. The intercession of a local lord was often key here.
A Germanic trial in the 14th century.
Prisma/UIG via Getty Images
Early Germanic law endeavored to contain this sanctioned vigilantism. It assigned monetary values to virtually every antisocial act to encourage material compensation over vengeance. In Æthelberht of Kent’s code, every lopped-off finger, dislodged tooth or wound had a precisely delineated worth. In the case of murder, everyone had a “wergild” – literally, “man money” – assessed according to their social status. One fascinating law penalized the destruction of the male “genital limb” at three “man-prices.” Perhaps there were things deemed worse than death.
Medieval kingdoms incrementally forged more sophisticated institutions to mete out justice. The 12th century – the chronological muse of “House of the Dragon” – saw the emergence of English common law. Inquests gathered information, grand juries leveled accusations, sheriffs apprehended wrongdoers, and trial juries rendered verdicts.
Despite efforts to develop legal systems, in medieval Europe – as in Westeros – the king was the final arbiter.
In the show, a humble shepherd petitions King Aegon for relief from hardship for sheep taken through a royal tithe to feed dragons; Aegon refuses. The blacksmith Hugh Hammer requests payment for dragon-slaying weapons he is crafting and receives only Aegon’s empty promise of recompense.
These impositions are reminiscent of medieval taxation and the English king’s “right of purveyance,” which gave the king the ability to appropriate, at his pleasure, food and goods. Abuse of purveyance led to its regulation in the Magna Carta, the first document to put in writing that a king is not above the law.
But what did the elite’s machinations, whether in Westeros or medieval England, mean for society’s lower echelons?
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of Season Two is the focus on the everyday people of Westeros. Mysaria – an immigrant, one-time thief, prostitute and paid informant – becomes confidant to Rhaenyra. Keenly aware she is “common-born,” Mysaria is able to observe how elite animosities rain downward on a vulnerable populace that possesses little recourse.
Through her struggles, Mysaria, played by Sonoya Mizuno, develops a keen understanding of commoners.
Theo Whiteman/HBO
In the show, Rhaenyra’s naval blockade of King’s Landing most poignantly exposes the plight of regular people. Until Rhaenyra can muster a land army, the blockade is the only tactic she could direct at her opponents.
Food becomes exorbitantly expensive. Purchasing and hoarding by the better off worsens the dearth. Hungry commoners scrap with one another over bare morsels. As starvation looms, Hugh Hammer and his family attempt to flee to the countryside, only to find themselves locked inside the city by royal command.
In her clear-eyed understanding of the dynamic between the elite and commoners, Mysaria foresees blowback for burdens inflicted on the poor.
For her, law and order is only sustained by the extent to which everyday people buy into the system. She counsels Rhaenyra not to undervalue her subjects. Their power resides in their sheer numbers.
The women devise a plan to permit unmanned boatloads of food to pass through the blockade into the harbor of King’s Landing under Rhaenyra’s banner to weaponize the people’s misery. The people conclude that Rhaenyra, even though the blockade is hers, cares for the common born, while her opponents, seemingly oblivious to their hardship, continue to feast in the Red Keep, the royal castle.
News of this food sparks a riot against the supporters of Rhaenyra’s opponent.
This explosion of popular violence has its medieval analogue in the urban and rural uprisings of the 14th century, a century beset by a “plague of insurrection,” most famously the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Rhaenyra understands how decades of peace efface the collective memory of warfare’s inherent awfulness.
She poses a quintessentially medieval query after her father’s death: “As queen, what is my true duty to the realm … ? Ensuring peace and stability? Or that I sit on the Iron Throne no matter the cost?”
Rhaenyra’s musings about leadership during a fractious era evoke not only the Middle Ages, but also U.S. politics today – a moment beset by aging rulers, political tribalism, rising inequality and murmurings of armed civil strife.
David Routt, Adjunct Professor of History, University of Richmond
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
