ISRAELI STRIKES HAVE killed dozens of people in areas of eastern and southern Lebanon.

Lebanon’s health ministry said Israeli strikes on the country’s eastern Bekaa Valley today killed 40 people, increasing from an earlier toll that identified 22 dead.

“Israeli enemy strikes that targeted the Baalbek district” left “40 dead and 52 wounded”, the health ministry statement said, listing tolls for 10 different locations.

Additionally, the health ministry said 12 people were killed and 50 others were wounded in Israeli strikes in the south today.

The ministry in separate statements reported “seven dead and 24 wounded” in “Israeli enemy strikes” on south Lebanon’s Nabatiyeh district, and “five dead and 26 wounded” in strikes elsewhere in south Lebanon.

Earlier, Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) reported at least 12 strikes, some of them “very violent”, on Beirut’s southern suburbs throughout today, targeting districts including Shiyah, Hadath and Haret Hreik, with a raid on the Kafaat neighbourhood destroying a building and damaging others nearby.

Israeli first responders said a man was killed today after rocket fire from Lebanon hit the Galilee region in Israel’s north.

Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee on social media platform X issued several rounds of evacuation warnings for Beirut’s southern suburbs, as well as areas in and around the southern coastal city of Tyre, where the NNA reported Israeli strikes.

There were no warnings for east Lebanon.

Adraee said on X that the Israeli military “targeted a weapons depot, a command headquarters and terrorist infrastructure” belonging to Hezbollah in south Beirut.

AFP footage showed columns of smoke rising from the southern suburbs, usually a densely populated residential district but now largely emptied.

Amid a series of attack claims, Hezbollah said its fighters targeted “the Hatzor air base” near Israel’s southern city of Ashdod, around 150 kilometres (90 miles) from Lebanon’s southern border, “with a missile salvo” — its deepest target in more than a year of hostilities.

In nine separate statements, Hezbollah said its fighters also targeted Israeli troops in and near the south Lebanon town of Khiam, including with artillery, rockets and drones.

The NNA said “the enemy army” was “blowing up homes and residential buildings during its incursion into the town”.

Lebanon’s official news agency and Hezbollah have reported fighting and air strikes in the Khiam area ever since Israeli ground troops first entered Lebanon on 30 September, a week after Israel escalated its air raids against Hezbollah targets.

The renewed Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs came after relative calm in the capital while United States envoy Amos Hochstein visited earlier this week, seeking to broker an end to the almost two-month-long Israel-Hezbollah war.

Today, United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert visited Baalbek’s UNESCO-listed archaeological area, after the UN’s cultural body this week granted more than 30 heritage sites in Lebanon “provisional enhanced protection” amid the war.

Lebanon’s health ministry said today that at least 3,583 people had been killed in the violence since October 2023.

Most of the deaths have been since September this year.

The Israeli military said Wednesday that three soldiers were killed in south Lebanon, bringing to 52 the number killed in Lebanon since the start of ground operations.

© AFP 2024