BEIRUT, Lebanon
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 490 people, including children, in Lebanon on Monday, the Health Ministry said, in what is by far the deadliest cross-border escalation since war erupted in Gaza on October 7.
Monday’s confrontations
between Hezbollah and the Israeli army entered a new phase of violence,
disregarding all red lines.
The Litani River no longer
served as a boundary to Israeli expansion northward.
According to the Lebanese
Health Ministry’s health emergency center, the initial toll from more than 350
Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon and the Bekaa region was 356 dead
and 1,246 wounded, including children, women, and paramedics.
The battle, which Hezbollah
calls the “open-ended battle of reckoning,” has ignited Lebanon from the south
to the east, with the Israeli army launching a series of wide-ranging air
attacks early in the morning.
Dozens of warplanes
simultaneously targeted residential homes, the squares of populated towns,
valleys, and forests.
The Israeli military claimed
that Hezbollah “uses civilian homes and private civilian facilities as hideouts
to launch rockets,” similar to the war scenario in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli army spokesperson
Daniel Hagari said that “Hezbollah is hiding guided missiles inside civilian
homes.” Meanwhile, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
noted: “Hezbollah used Iranian drones against Israel.”
Israeli Foreign Minister
Israel Katz said that Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah had turned
the people of Lebanon into “hostages, placing rockets and weapons inside their
homes and towns to threaten Israel’s home front.”
He said the people of Lebanon
should evacuate “any house that has become a site for the service of the
Hezbollah organization to avoid harm.”
Caretaker Prime Minister Najib
Mikati said that the ongoing Israeli “aggression against Lebanon constitutes a
genocide in every sense of the word, as well as a destructive plan aimed at
annihilating villages and towns and eradicating all green spaces.”
He reiterated his appeal to
“decision-making countries to exert pressure on Israel to cease its aggression,
implement UN Security Council resolution 2735, and resolve the Palestinian
issue based on the adoption of the two-state solution and a just and comprehensive
peace.”
He said: “We reaffirm our full
commitment to resolution 1701 and, as a government, we are working to halt the
renewed Israeli war while striving to avoid, as much as possible, falling into
the unknown.”
Mikati spoke as the Israeli
army launched on Monday morning a series of large-scale attacks from Lebanon’s
south to east.
The army vowed to target sites
deep in the Bekaa Valley in the afternoon.
Dozens of towns in the border
region and in the area of Tyre were targeted by airstrikes.
The Israeli army hit a home
housing seven people in the town of Barich in the Tyre district, killing five
people, including children.
It also targeted the Nabatieh
area, western Bekaa (specifically Machghara, Sohmor, and Yohmor), as well as
the Jezzine area and Deir Al-Zahrani, all the way to Maghdoucheh and Ghaziyeh
on the outskirts of Sidon.
The echoes of Israeli
airstrikes on northern Bekaa resonated throughout the region.
People spoke of “highly
destructive Israeli missiles.”
Loud explosions shook the
Hermel highlands near the Syrian border.
A strike on these highlands
killed one person and injured six others, two of whom are in intensive care.
Injured children were
separated from their families upon being transferred to hospitals, prompting
appeals for anyone with information about their relatives to come forward.
Women who were in their homes
were buried under the rubble.
Calls were made through social
media for nurses to report to hospitals that had exceeded their capacity to
assist in providing care to those in need.
The Ministry of Health has
requested that “all hospitals in the southern provinces, as well as in Nabatieh
and Baalbek-Hermel, suspend all non-urgent procedures to allocate resources for
the treatment of casualties resulting from the ongoing Israeli aggression
against Lebanon.”
Israeli media reported that
some airstrikes penetrated as deep as 125 km into Lebanese territory.
The Israeli Broadcasting
Authority said that the air force “attacked the northern Lebanon Valley area,
about 130 km from Israel’s northern border.”
The Israeli army accompanied
its aggression with recorded voice messages to Lebanese cell phones in various
areas, especially the south and Bekaa, extending to Beirut and Akkar in the
north.
The messages urged people to
evacuate homes near Hezbollah centers.
The telecom company Ogero
reported that Lebanon received “about 80,000 suspected Israeli call attempts.”
The messages instructed people
to “evacuate areas where Hezbollah weapons or infrastructure are located within
at least 1,000 meters, or head to the local school and not return until further
notice.”
The warning was echoed by a
similar statement from the Israeli army’s spokesperson, addressing “villages in
the Bekaa region.”
The airstrikes and phone
threats had an immediate effect, as schools halted operations and urged parents
to pick up their children.
Many families quickly fled
from southern areas, which until recently were considered safe, heading deeper
into Lebanon.
The entrance to Sidon, leading
to Beirut, was jammed with thousands of cars carrying families and their
belongings.
Displaced people have moved
from the south to the predominantly Christian and Druze areas of Mount Lebanon,
as well as to Beirut, which has a Sunni majority.
Additionally, some displaced
persons have arrived in Akkar, located in the far north of Lebanon, where
efforts have been made to provide them with housing.
The spokesperson for the
Israeli army, Avichay Adraee, claimed that the military targeted “only the
buildings that contain weapons belonging to Hezbollah.”
He addressed the residents of
Lebanese villages, asking them to evacuate the homes where Hezbollah had
concealed weapons immediately.
He said Hezbollah “is
deceiving you and sacrificing you. While Hezbollah claims that you are part of
its community and its supporters, it appears that its missiles and drones are
more valuable and significant to it than you are.”
Reports on Monday indicated
that an Israeli missile fell in a barren area in the Jbeil district in northern
Lebanon, predominantly inhabited by Christians, with a Shiite presence.
The Lebanese army investigated
the incident, and security sources suggested that the missile might have landed
accidentally in the area.
UNIFIL, the UN’s peacekeeping
force in Lebanon, asked all its civilian employees to leave with their families
to safe areas north of the Litani River.
In response to the Israeli
attack, Hezbollah said it “bombed the reserve headquarters of the Israeli
army’s northern corps, the Galilee Division Reserve Base, and its stores of
logistics at Ami’ad Base as well as Rafael’s military-industrial complexes in
Zevulun area, north of Haifa, with dozens of missiles.”
Sirens sounded in Margaliot in
the Upper Galilee, as reported by Israeli media.
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