LAST UPDATE | 14 Oct
LEBANON’S HEALTH MINISTRY has said at least 21 people have died in a rare Israeli strike on a northern Christian-majority village, far from Hezbollah strongholds, with DNA tests being conducted to identify body parts.
A Lebanese security official told AFP the building “housed families displaced from Lebanon’s south, and was targeted shortly after a man had arrived in a car”.
He requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“The Israeli enemy strike on the village of Aito… killed in a preliminary toll 21 people and injured eight. DNA tests are being conducted to determine the identity of body parts recovered at the strike site,” the ministry said, referring to a village in the Christian-majority Zgharta district.
The official National News Agency said Israel targeted a “residential apartment” in the village.
So far, Israeli strikes have mainly been concentrated in predominantly Shiite Muslim areas, where Hezbollah built its power base in a state wracked by sectarianism.
An AFP photographer at the site of the strike said it had levelled a residential building at the entrance to the village.
Body parts were scattered in the rubble, with Red Cross volunteers searching for survivors in the wreckage while ambulances evacuated the wounded.
The Lebanese army imposed a security cordon in the area, where the strike also sparked a fire, he said.
In another strike outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds, on Saturday the health ministry reported two dead and four wounded in an Israeli strike on Deir Billa, about 15 kilometres from the town of Batroun on Lebanon’s north coast.
Earlier today, Hezbollah said its fighters fired artillery rounds at Israeli troops attempting an “infiltration” into south Lebanon.
“During an enemy infantry force’s attempted infiltration into Lebanese territory” near the border village of Markaba, Hezbollah fighters targeted the force “with artillery shells”, a statement said.
It added that adding Hezbollah targeted Israeli soldiers elsewhere with rockets, including in south Lebanon’s Labbouneh area.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military said a Hezbollah drone killed four soldiers at one of its northern bases on Sunday.
The attack on a military training camp in Binyamina, near Haifa, was the deadliest such assault on an Israeli base since 23 September, when Israel increased its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Emergency services reported more than 60 wounded.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to “mercilessly strike” Hezbollah in all parts of Lebanon, including Beirut.
In a video message posted to X this evening, Netanyahu denied that his army is deliberately targeting peacekeepers and repeated a call for them to “get out of harm’s way”.
He said his government has “repeatedly asked them to temporarily leave the combat zone”.
“We regret any harm done to Unifil personnel and the IDF is doing its utmost to prevent such incidents.”
Five Blue Helmets have so far been injured, provoking international condemnation.
Taoiseach Simon Harris has said attacks on peacekeepers are “utterly unacceptable” and a “clear breach of international law”.
He today told Israeli President Isaac Herzog in a phone call that UNIFIL has “a clear mandate from the Security Council, and that it must be allowed to carry out its functions unimpeded”.
In Gaza, authorities said the death toll from an Israeli strike on Sunday on a school being used as a shelter for displaced people had risen to 15, including whole families, while a separate overnight strike on a hospital killed four.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets and drones into Israel for more than a year in support of Hamas militants in Gaza.
Since late September, however, its strikes have reached further into the country.
Israel’s sophisticated air defences have intercepted most of the projectiles, with few casualties caused by strikes or falling debris.
Israel’s recent strikes have increasingly focused on areas beyond Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in southern Beirut, and Lebanon’s south and east.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said Israeli forces had “escalated their attacks” on southern Lebanon with “successive air strikes” pounding several border villages.
Hezbollah said its forces clashed several times with Israeli troops who tried to “infiltrate” villages along the border.
Before the drone strike it had said it launched a salvo of rockets at a “base in southern Haifa”.
The group later aired an audio recording of its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah calling on fighters to “defend this holy and blessed land and this honourable people”.
Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike in south Beirut on 27 September and several other senior commanders of the movement have also been killed.
Israel’s military said about 115 projectiles fired by Hezbollah had crossed into Israeli territory by Sunday afternoon.
A Hezbollah fighter was captured emerging from a tunnel in south Lebanon on Sunday, Israel’s military said, the first such announcement since the start of the ground offensive.
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