This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Paul Moss and at 4 hours GMT on Tuesday the 1st of October.

This is a special edition of the podcast.

The Israeli army has begun what it calls a targeted ground operation in Lebanon.

It says it targeted Hezbollah in villages close to the border with Israel.

Also in this podcast, the US has said it supports the objectives of Israel's incursion and has warned of serious consequences for Iran if it attacks Israel in support of Hezbollah.

We'll have reports and analysis from the BBC's correspondence in the region and from our international experts.

So is this the much anticipated invasion?

For months commentators have predicted that Israeli ground troops would end up crossing the border into Lebanon.

Army chiefs have recently been hinting it was about to happen and now it has sort of a

statement by the Israeli military said they'd begun limited and localized raids

against Hezbollah targets in the border area.

They're supported, we're told, by the Israeli Air Force and artillery.

Now, bear in mind that previous invasions have seen Israeli tanks go deep into Lebanese territory, indeed all the way to the capital Beirut.

So this could indeed be a relatively limited incursion.

For the latest on what that means in practice, I turn to our correspondent in Beirut, Anna Foster.

For the first time since the war in 2006, there are Israeli soldiers operating inside Lebanon, and that is a big moment. It is something that the

international community that world leaders had tried to avoid. They'd been

calling for some kind of ceasefire, for de-escalation. The idea for saying this is going to be

a localized limited ground campaign, but it's very hard to see what that will look like at this stage.

They want to try and recreate this buffer zone

all the way between the Israel-Lebanon border

...