Beirut- The Israeli warplanes conducted extensive airstrikes against towns and villages across Lebanon on Monday leaving 274 people, including 21 children dead and more than a thousand wounded. It is by far the deadliest cross-border escalation since war erupted in Gaza on October 8.
Israel said it hit about 800 Hezbollah sites in south and east Lebanon during the day and carried out a “targeted strike” later in Beirut. A source close to Hezbollah said the strike on the capital targeted a senior commander.
Families from south Lebanon clogged the highways north on Monday, fleeing an expanding Israeli aerial onslaught for an uncertain future with children crammed onto parents’ laps, suitcases tied to car roofs and dark smoke rising behind them.
Countless cars, vans and pick-up trucks were loaded with belongings and filled with people, sometimes several generations to a vehicle, while other families had fled fast, taking only the bare essentials as bombs rained down from above, Reuters reported.
“The strength and intensity of the bombing are something we haven’t witnessed before in all the previous wars,” said Abu Hassan Kahoul, on his way to Beirut with his family after two buildings were levelled near the apartment block where he lives.
“Small children don’t know what is happening but there’s fear in their eyes,” he added.
Even in Beirut there was growing alarm, and parents rushed to pull their children from schools as Israel warned of more strikes. “The situation is not reassuring,” said a man called Issa, coming to pick up a young student.
Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said the Israeli strikes that began in the morning killed 274 people, including 21 children and 39 women. He said about 5,000 people had been wounded since Tuesday.
World powers have implored Israel and Hezbollah to pull back from the brink of all-out war, with the focus of violence shifting sharply in recent days from Israel’s southern front with Gaza to its northern border with Lebanon.
Abiad said “thousands of families from the targeted areas have been displaced”.
The Israeli military also warned people living in the Bekaa valley, in eastern Lebanon, to flee their homes, as it announced it was “broadening” the scope of its strikes.
Explosions around the ancient city of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon triggered flashes of fire and sent smoke billowing into the sky.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) later reported new “enemy raids targeted the mountain” areas in the Baalbek region and several towns and villages, adding that “the Israeli enemy” launched a strike on the town of Hermel.
The NNA said Lebanese had received phone messages from Israel telling them to “quickly evacuate”.
Hezbollah, a powerful political and military force in Lebanon, has exchanged near-daily fire with Israel in support of besieged people in Gaza.
Hezbollah said that it targeted three sites in northern Israel, including military production facilities, in retaliation for IDF strikes on Lebanon.
“In response to the Israeli enemy attacks that targeted the south and Bekaa areas”, Hezbollah fighters bombed two military positions in northern Israel, as well as the “Rafael Defense Industries complexes” north of Haifa, the group said in a release.
– Israel changing ‘security balance’ –
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel was preempting threats and was acting to change the “security balance” in the north.
Hezbollah’s deputy chief, Naim Qassem, said Sunday the group was in a “new phase, namely an open reckoning” with Israel, and ready for “all military possibilities”.
They spoke after Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel caused damage in the area of Haifa, a major city on Israel’s north coast.
On Sunday morning, hundreds of thousands of people in northern Israel fled to their bomb shelters as Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets across the border.
The attack came after an Israeli air strike in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold on Friday killed its elite Radwan Force commander, Ibrahim Aqil, along with other commanders and civilians.
Last week on Tuesday and Wednesday, coordinated communications device blasts that Hezbollah blamed on Israel killed 39 people and wounded almost 3,000.
Since the cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah began in October, tens of thousands of people on both sides have fled their homes.
“We sleep and wake up to bombardment… that’s what our life has become,” said Wafaa Ismail, 60, a housewife from the southern Lebanese village of Zawtar.
An Israeli military official on Monday outlined the goals of the military operation.
It seeks to “degrade threats” from Hezbollah, push them back from the border, and then to destroy infrastructure built near the frontier by Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, the official said.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati urged the United Nation and world powers to deter what he called Israel’s “plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns”.
– Another Gaza? –
US President Joe Biden, whose country is Israel’s main ally and weapons supplier, said his administration was “going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out”.
Ahead of the annual General Assembly in New York, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned of Lebanon becoming “another Gaza” and said it was “clear that both sides are not interested in a ceasefire” there.
Speaking at the General Assembly, Masoud Pezeshkian, the recently elected president of Iran — which backs Hezbollah and Hamas — accused Israel of seeking “to create this wider conflict”.
The UNIFIL peacekeeping force in south Lebanon meanwhile warned that “any further escalation of this dangerous situation could have far-reaching and devastating consequences”.
Earlier Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani called the Israeli strikes as “insane” and cautioned against “the dangerous consequences of the Zionists’ new adventure.”
Iraq’s top Shia Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, on Monday urged for “every possible effort” to stop Israeli “aggression” against Lebanon, particularly targeting the Hezbollah movement.
Sistani called for actions to end this “barbaric aggression” and to protect the Lebanese people.
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