Israeli attacks in Lebanon kill at least 25 people

Blood. Israeli airstrikes hit different parts of Lebanon and killed at least 25 people, authorities said Wednesday, including more than a dozen in a southern town where Israeli bombings in previous conflicts have been etched in local memory.

Elsewhere in the south of the country, the mayor of one city was among those killed in an attack that Lebanese officials said targeted a meeting to coordinate relief efforts.

Israeli military forces said the target of Tuesday night’s attacks in the southern town of Qana was a Hezbollah commander. Fifteen people died. Associated Press photos and videos at the scene showed several buildings destroyed and others with upper floors demolished. Rescue workers carried away the remains of the dead and used an excavator to remove debris while searching for more victims.

Israel said the target was Jalal Mustafa Hariri, the Hezbollah commander in charge of the Qana region.

In 1996, Israeli artillery fire on a United Nations compound hosting hundreds of displaced people in Qana killed at least 100 civilians and wounded dozens more, including four UN peacekeepers. During the 2006 war, an Israeli attack on a residential building killed nearly three dozen people, a third of them children. Israel then said it had hit a Hezbollah rocket launcher behind the building.

“Qana always gets its share,” Mayor Mohammed Krasht told the AP, referring to the town’s bleak history.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s interim prime minister, Najib Mikati, accused Israel of “intentionally attacking” a municipal council meeting held to discuss relief efforts in Nabatiyeh, where six people died.

“What solution can be expected in the face of this reality,” he asked in a statement.

Attacks continued across Lebanon, including in the eastern Bekaa Valley and Nabatiyeh in the south of the country, where the Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah command centers and weapons facilities that had become embedded in civilian areas. Hezbollah launched more than 90 projectiles into Israel on Wednesday, wounding four civilians, according to the Israeli Rescue Services.

Israel also resumed its bombing of Beirut’s southern suburbs after a six-day pause, hitting what it said was a weapons warehouse under an apartment building, without providing evidence. The military warned residents to evacuate the area before the attack, and no casualties were reported.

During an assessment of the situation in northern Israel on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was gathering intelligence from its capture of Hezbollah militants that was significantly weakening the Lebanese political-paramilitary group’s capabilities. to carry out attacks. “We will conduct negotiations under fire, I said it on the first day, I said it in Gaza, I said it here – this is our tool,” he said.

The bombings in southern Beirut were the first in six days and came after Mikati said the US government had assured him that Israel would reduce its attacks on the Lebanese capital.

Hezbollah has a strong presence in southern Beirut, an area known as Dahiyeh, which is also a bustling commercial and residential area where many civilians and people not affiliated with the political and military group live.

Before the bombing, the Israeli military posted an evacuation notice on social media site X saying it would attack a building in the Haret Hreik neighborhood. An Associated Press photographer who witnessed the impacts said there had been three in the area, the first of them less than an hour after the warning.

In Nabatiyeh, more than a dozen projectiles rocked the city and its surrounding areas, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which reported at least six dead and 43 wounded. Among them was the city’s mayor, Ahmad Kahil, provincial governor Huwaida Turk told The Associated Press.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on October 8 in solidarity with the Palestinian armed group Hamas after Hamas’ surprise attack in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. A year of low-level fighting escalated last month into an open war that has displaced 1.2 million people in Lebanon.

Israeli fire has killed about 2,300 people in Lebanon since last October, more than three-quarters of them in the last month, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health.

Hezbollah rocket attacks, which have increased in distance and intensity in the last month, have driven some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north. The attacks have killed nearly 60 people in Israel, around half of them soldiers.

Hezbollah has said it will continue attacking until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, but that possibility appears increasingly remote after months-brokered negotiations between the United States, Egypt and Qatar stalled last month.

Israel invaded Lebanon this month following airstrikes that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of its top commanders, and has conducted ground operations along the border. It has vowed to continue its offensive until its citizens can safely return to towns near the border.

Israel remains at war in Gaza more than a year after the Hamas attack, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped another 250. About 100 captives remain in Gaza, of whom He believes that a third have died.

Israel launched a major operation more than a week ago in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in northern Gaza that dates back to the 1948 war over the creation of Israel. Israeli forces have returned several times to Jabaliya and other areas after saying Hamas militants had regrouped.

Hospitals have received about 350 bodies since the offensive began on Oct. 6, said Dr. Mounir al-Boursh, director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry.

More than half of the dead were women and children, he told The Associated Press, and many bodies remain in the streets and under rubble because Israeli attacks prevent rescuers from reaching them. “Entire families have disappeared,” he said.

The Israeli offensive has killed more than 42,000 people, according to the Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but notes that more than half were women and children. The military campaign has left much of the territory in ruins and displaced around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to settle in overcrowded camps or schools converted into shelters. .