Israeli airstrikes pounded areas across Lebanon, killing at least 25 people, officials said Wednesday (October 16, 2024), including more than a dozen in a southern town where Israeli bombardments in previous conflicts are seared into local memory.

Elsewhere in the south, a city’s Mayor was among the dead in a strike that Lebanese officials said targeted a meeting to coordinate relief efforts.

The Israeli military said they were targeting a Hezbollah commander in the strikes late Tuesday (October 15, 2024) on the southern town of Qana, where 15 people were killed. Associated Press photos and video of the scene showed several flattened buildings and others with their top floors collapsed. Rescue workers carried away the remains of dead people and used a bulldozer to remove rubble, as they searched for more victims.

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

In 1996, Israeli artillery shelling on a United Nations compound housing hundreds of displaced people in Qana killed at least 100 civilians and wounded scores more people, including four U.N. peacekeepers. During the 2006 war, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed nearly three dozen people, a third of them children. Israel said at the time that it struck a Hezbollah rocket launcher behind the building.

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

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, meanwhile accused Israel of “intentionally targeting” a municipal council meeting to discuss relief efforts in Nabatiyeh, where six people were killed.

“What solution can be hoped for in light of this reality?” he asked in a statement.

Strikes continued across Lebanon, including in the eastern Bekaa Valley and Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli military said it targeted Hezbollah command centres and weapons facilities that had been embedded in civilian areas. Hezbollah launched more than 90 projectiles towards Israel on Wednesday (October 16, 2024), wounding four civilians, according to Israel Rescue Services.

Israel also resumed its barrage on Beirut’s southern suburbs after a six-day pause, hitting what it said was an arms warehouse under an apartment building, without providing evidence. The military warned residents to evacuate before the strike, and there were no reports of casualties.

During an assessment of the situation in Israel’s north on Wednesday (October 16, 2024), Israel Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was gleaning intelligence from their capture of Hezbollah militants that was significantly weakening Hezbollah’s ability to launch attacks. “We will conduct negotiations under fire, I said that on the first day, I said it in Gaza, I said it here – this is our tool,” he told soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.

The strikes on southern Beirut came after Mikati said the United States had given him assurances that Israel would curb its strikes on the capital.

Hezbollah has a strong presence in southern Beirut, known as the Dahiyeh, which is also a residential and commercial area home to large numbers of civilians and people unaffiliated with the militant group.

The Israeli military posted an evacuation warning on the social media platform X ahead of the strike in Beirut. An Associated Press photographer saw three airstrikes in the area, the first coming less than an hour after the notice.

In Nabatiyeh, more than half a dozen strikes hit the city and surrounding areas, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which said at least six people were killed and 43 wounded, with rescue efforts still underway. The city’s mayor, Ahmad Kahil, was among those killed, provincial governor Huwaida Turk told The Associated Press.

In his statement about Nabatiyeh, Mr. Mikati, the caretaker Prime Minister, said the international community has been “deliberately silent” about Israeli strikes that have killed civilians.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert called reports of Kahlil’s death “alarming.”

“This attack follows other incidents in which civilians and civilian infrastructure have been targeted across Lebanon,” she said.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on October 8, 2023, in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, following the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

A year of low-level fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border escalated into all-out war last month, and Israel invaded Lebanon at the start of October. Israeli airstrikes have killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of his senior commanders, and Israel has vowed to continue its offensive until its citizens can safely return to communities near the border.

Some 2,300 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since last October, more than three-quarters of them in the past month, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The fighting has displaced some 1.2 million people in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, which have extended their range and grown more intense over the past month, have driven around 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 keep up its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, but that appears increasingly remote after months of negotiations brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar sputtered to a halt.

Israel is still at war in Gaza more than a year after Hamas’ attack, in which some 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and another 250 were abducted. Around 100 captives are still being held, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel has been carrying out a major operation for more than a week in Jabaliya, an urban refugee camp in the territory’s north dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to Jabaliya and other areas after saying that Hamas militants had regrouped.

Hospitals have received around 350 bodies since the offensive began on October 6, according to Dr. Mounir al-Boursh, the director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry.

He told the AP that more than half the dead were women and children, and that many bodies remain in the streets and under the rubble, with rescue teams unable to reach them because of Israeli strikes. “Entire families have disappeared,” he said.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 people, according to the Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters but says more than half were women and children. The offensive has left large areas in ruins and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people, forcing hundreds of thousands into crowded tent camps or schools-turned-shelters.

An Israeli airstrike killed two Lebanese soldiers and wounded three on Friday (October 11, 2024), Lebanon’s military said, just hours after the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, injuring two of them for the second day in a row.

The incidents entangling both Lebanon’s official Army — which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah — and the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon raised alarm as Israel broadens its campaign against Hezbollah with waves of heavy airstrikes across the country and a ground invasion at the border.

In central Beirut, rescue workers combed Friday through the rubble of a collapsed building, searching for survivors of an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens in the Lebanese capital the night before.

Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel over the past year in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 250 taken hostage.

In return, Israel’s military has pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, killing more than 2,237 Lebanese — including Hezbollah fighters, civilians and medical personnel — according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

Among them, the Ministry reported late Friday, were a two-year-old and 16-year-old killed by airstrikes in the southern village of Baysarieh.

Hezbollah attacks have killed 29 civilians as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, both in northern Israel since October 2023, and in southern Lebanon since Sept. 30, when Israel launched its ground invasion.

Israel strikes a Lebanese Army checkpoint

On Friday, the Lebanese Army said an Israeli airstrike hit a building near a military checkpoint in the southern Bint Jbeil province.

The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon when reports emerged that it had hit several Lebanese army soldiers. The Israeli Army said it investigated the incident but remained “unaware of any Lebanese Army facilities found in the area of the strike.”

Lebanon’s Army is not a party to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah — after Israel launched its ground invasion on Sept. 30, Lebanese soldiers withdrew some 5 kilometres (3 miles) from their observation posts along the border.

The only direct clash between the two national armies occurred on Oct. 3, when Israeli tank fire hit a Lebanese Army post also in the area of Bint Jbeil, killing a soldier and prompting Lebanese soldiers to return fire.

Both Lebanese troops and U.N. peacekeepers are deployed in southern Lebanon to enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended a bloody monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

But Lebanon’s Army is no match for Hezbollah, and neither its soldiers nor the peacekeepers have been capable of preventing the Shiite militants from entrenching themselves in the border region. Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure along the border in violation of the U.N. resolution.

Israel hits U.N. peacekeepers again, wounding two

The Israeli military opened fire near the U.N. headquarters in Lebanon’s southern town of Naqoura on Friday, the Army said, hitting the observation post and injuring two peacekeepers for the second time in as many days.

An initial review by the Israeli Army found that soldiers in southern Lebanon targeted what they believed to be a threat located some 50 metres (yards) from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon but ultimately struck the peacekeepers.

One of the injured peacekeepers was hospitalized in the nearby city of Tyre while the other received medical care on site, the United Nations force, known as UNIFIL, said. Both were identified as Sri Lankan.

The Army repeated its warning that UNIFIL personnel abandon their positions in areas where Hezbollah militants launch rockets into Israel. Following Thursday’s attack, the U.N. peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said 300 peacekeepers in front-line positions on southern Lebanon’s border were temporarily moved to larger bases.

In a statement condemning the strike as “a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” UNIFIL reported that explosions on Friday hit the same place they did the day before, when Israeli tank fire injured two Indonesian peacekeepers, damaged vehicles and a communication system, and drew sharp international criticism.

“Peacekeepers must be protected by all parties of the conflict, and what has happened is obviously condemnable,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The French Foreign Ministry accused Israel of deliberately firing at peacekeepers and summoned the Israeli ambassador Friday in an official protest.

In a call with his Israeli counterpart, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the importance of ensuring the safety of UNIFIL forces and urged Israel to “pivot from military operations to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible,” the Pentagon said.

When President Joe Biden was questioned by reporters whether he was asking Israel to stop striking U.N. peacekeepers, he replied, “Absolutely, positively.”

UNIFIL, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The U.N. expanded its mission following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.

Beirut residents left reeling from Israeli strikes

From the Burj Abi Haidar neighbourhood of central Beirut, civil defence workers dug through concrete and twisted metal from a three-story building brought down by an Israeli airstrike the day before — the deadliest Israeli air raid to hit Beirut over the last year of war.

Thursday’s airstrikes hit two residential buildings in neighbourhoods that have swelled with displaced people fleeing Israeli bombardment elsewhere in Lebanon.

“The world suddenly turned upside down,” recalled Ahmad al-Khatib, a 42-year-old Lebanese postal worker who was with his wife and toddler daughter in his in-laws’ apartment when the bombs fell on the building next-door.

Al-Khatib said he had pulled his 2 ½-year-old, Ayla, out from under the debris of a collapsed bedroom wall. The force of the explosion had flung his wife, Marwa Hamdan, against a wall and a piece of metal hit her in the head. She remains in intensive care, he said, tears running down his cheeks.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV channel and Israeli media reported that the strikes aimed to kill Wafiq Safa, a top security official with the group, but he was not in either targeted building at the time of the strike. The Israeli military had no comment on the reports.

Another resident, Mohammed Tarhani, said he had moved in with his brother in Burj Abi Haidar after fleeing southern Lebanon to escape airstrikes in the past weeks.

“Where is one supposed to go now?” he asked.

Hezbollah kept up its rocket fire into Israel Friday, setting off air raid sirens just north of Tel Aviv. Interceptions by Israel’s air defense system scattered rocket fragments in the seaside suburb of Herzliya and sent shrapnel flying into a building there, causing damage but no casualties.

While disrupting life for Israelis, most of Hezbollah’s barrages have not caused casualties. But early Friday, an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon killed a man from Thailand working on a farm in northern Israel.

Hezbollah’s chief spokesperson vowed the group would expand its attacks into more populated areas deeper inside Israel.

“This is only the beginning,” Mohammed Afif told reporters from a smouldering street left in ruins by recent Israeli airstrikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “I tell the enemy that you have only seen the minimum.”