Israeli bombardment reduces buildings to craters in southern Lebanon | Lebanon
Israel launched an overnight attack on Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and the southern province of Tire, killing at least four people and turning buildings into craters.
Attacks on southern Lebanon continued on Saturday morning; Nearby Lebanese military barracks were shot, a man on a motorcycle was killed in the town of Nabatieh, and people were also killed and injured in the town of Chehabiyeh, where the death toll is not yet known.
The bombings were the latest in a series of bloody days in Lebanon. Israel killed 10 people on Friday, including a child and six medics, including one who worked as a photojournalist.
Video of one of the Israeli attacks, released by the Lebanese Ministry of Health on Friday morning, shows civil defense workers wearing high-visibility vests standing next to an injured person on a motorcycle in the town of Deir Qanoun al-Nahr. They signal an ambulance to come to them, and when it approaches, it is bombed, killing two paramedics and a child.
Among the dead was photojournalist Ahmed Hariri, who also worked as a civil defense photographer. Four medics from the Islamic Health Association were killed in Israel’s second airstrike on the southern town of Hannaouiyah.
The Israeli army said that it was examining allegations that “many people who were not the target of the attacks and who were not related to the incident in the region were harmed” in Hannaouiyah and Deir Qanoun en-Nahr. Stating that it took steps to mitigate potential civilian harm by ordering the people in both regions to leave the region, the company claimed that it targeted Hezbollah fighters it detected in the region.
88 percent of the cases in which the Israeli military said it would investigate allegations of war crimes were closed or left unsolved.
Israel continues to regularly attack Lebanon, both south and north of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, since the US-brokered ceasefire was declared in April. More than 3,111 people have lost their lives since the latest clashes between Hezbollah and Israel began on March 2. 817 of them have been killed or their bodies found since the ceasefire was established.
Hezbollah has continued to attack Israeli forces in southern Lebanon since the ceasefire, increasingly relying on low-budget, first-person perspective drones that the Israeli army has had difficulty capturing.
Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli soldiers gathered outside the southern Lebanon village of Deir Siryan with artillery shells and attacked an Israeli drone with a surface-to-air missile on Friday night.
Before Friday’s attacks in Tire, the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning for two areas of the southern Lebanese city and the village of Burj Rahal in the northeast. Before the strike, Lebanese officials went around neighborhoods and called on people to leave the neighborhood via loudspeakers.
Israel also struck the mountainous area on the outskirts of the town of Brital in the Bekaa valley and later released videos showing its attacks on an underground weapons facility. Over the past three years, Israel has repeatedly struck the valley where Hezbollah is said to store its long-range missiles, using the protection provided by the rugged terrain.
While Israeli air strikes have continuously hit the health infrastructure and healthcare workers since the declaration of the ceasefire, the Tebnine public hospital was severely damaged in the air strike on Thursday. Staff at the hospital, one of the last hospitals operating in southern Lebanon, were also injured.
According to the World Health Organization, numerous hospitals in southern Lebanon were damaged or out of service due to Israeli attacks, and 123 medics were killed by Israel.
The governments of Lebanon and Israel are participating in direct negotiations brokered by Washington, and a temporary ceasefire between the two countries has been extended twice. However, the ceasefire did not stop the clashes, on the contrary, it only largely saved Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, from strikes.
The Lebanese government wants a complete ceasefire in Lebanon as well as the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory as its first priority in the negotiations.
The Israeli government wants Hezbollah to be completely disarmed and has announced that it will withdraw from the 609 square kilometer area it occupies in Southern Lebanon only after the security of northern Israel residents is assured. According to analysis by research group Bellingcat, the Israeli army destroyed or damaged at least 46 villages in areas under its control.
Hezbollah has called for an end to direct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, framing them as Lebanon’s capitulation and surrender of its sovereignty.
The talks are linked to ongoing US-Iran negotiations. If these fail, it is thought that the Israel-Hezbollah war will begin again in full force.
The current round of conflict in Lebanon began on March 2, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leading to an Israeli bombing campaign and invasion.
