Israel carried out new strikes in southern Lebanon on Friday (May 15, 2026) that it said targeted the militant group Hezbollah, wounding 37 people as the two countries’ envoys started a second day of peace talks in Washington.

United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon Imran Riza condemned the “unacceptable” toll from continued attacks, saying that “diplomatic efforts now offer a critical opportunity to stop the violence”.

A truce in the war between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah has been in place since April 17, but it has not stopped the fighting, with hundreds killed in strikes since then and both sides accusing the other of violations.

“The IDF has begun striking Hezbollah infrastructure sites in the area of Tyre in southern Lebanon,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

An AFP correspondent reported a series of strikes, two of them near the city of Tyre, while state media said another targeted a centre run by a local NGO near a hospital.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said the strikes on the Tyre district wounded at least 37 people, including six hospital personnel, nine women and four children.

Hafez Ramadan, a resident near the building targeted by the airstrike, said it had housed people who had fled their towns due to the war, and was adjacent to a hotel where more displaced were staying.

“There are only women, children and the elderly here,” he said. “Because of this strike, people have been displaced again.”

The Israeli army had earlier issued evacuation warnings for five towns and villages in and around the southern coastal city.

It later issued a new evacuation warning for five other towns across the south.

‘Unacceptable’ toll

In a separate statement, the military said an Israeli soldier was killed in southern Lebanon, bringing the number of Israeli soldiers killed in clashes with Hezbollah since early March to 19. A civilian contractor was also killed.

It said it killed more than 220 Hezbollah fighters over the past week and struck hundreds of targets.

Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) reported other strikes on locations in the south not included in the Israeli evacuation warnings.

Hezbollah meanwhile claimed several attacks on Israeli troops in several southern Lebanese towns.

It also claimed a drone attack on the headquarters of the Israeli army’s 300th brigade, one of the units operating in Lebanon.

Riza said “the reality on the ground in Lebanon has been deeply alarming”, adding that “airstrikes and demolitions continue daily, with an unacceptable toll on civilians and civilian infrastructure”.

But he expressed his hope that the Lebanon-Israel talks “will pave the way toward a political solution”.

Representatives from Lebanon and Israel, officially at war for decades, resumed talks at the State Department in Washington shortly after 9:00 am (1300 GMT), one diplomat said.

The U.S. described the first day of talks in Washington on Thursday (May 14, 2026) as positive, but neither Lebanon or Israel have commented.

Lebanon hopes that the round of negotiations in Washington on Friday will end with an extension of the ceasefire and an agreement from Israel to halt its attacks.

If an extension is not agreed, the truce will expire on Sunday.

‘Humiliating’ talks

Lebanon was dragged into the West Asia war on March 2 when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Israeli attacks since then have killed more than 2,900 people in Lebanon, including more than 400 since the truce took effect, according to Lebanese authorities.

The negotiating teams in Washington are being led by Lebanon’s Simon Karam and Israel’s Yechiel Leiter, both political veterans with entrenched views.

A former Ambassador to Washington and independent politician, 76-year-old Karam is known for his defence of Lebanese unity in a country riven by sectarian divisions.

Leiter is Israel’s ambassador to the United States and a longtime ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and is well-versed in Israeli settler politics, conservative activism and hard-edged diplomacy.

Lebanon is under heavy U.S. and Israeli pressure to disarm Hezbollah.

Israeli troops have invaded parts of southern Lebanon since the start of the war, carrying out widespread demolitions of villages over the past weeks.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, rejects outright any direct engagement between the two countries.

Senior Hezbollah official Mahmud Qamati said Friday that Beirut “going to direct, humiliating negotiations with the Israeli enemy is not a separate issue from a comprehensive conspiracy against the nation, its sovereignty and its resistance” at a time when “the south is being destroyed and martyrs are being killed daily”.

Published – May 15, 2026 11:08 pm IST

A woman walks outside accommodations housing Lebanese fleeing the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, in al-Harjalah, south of the Syrian capital Damascus, on October 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Israel, which began incursions into south Lebanon two weeks ago to battle Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, has issued military evacuation orders affecting more than a quarter of the country, the U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday (October 15, 2024).

The figures underscore the heavy price Lebanese are paying as Israel steps up its campaign to defeat Hezbollah and destroy its infrastructure in their one-year conflict.

The U.N. refugee agency’s Middle East [West Asia] Director Rema Jamous Imseis told a press briefing in Geneva that new Israeli evacuation orders to 20 villages in southern Lebanon meant that over a quarter of the country was now affected. “People are heeding these calls to evacuate, and they’re fleeing with almost nothing.”

Israeli strikes have killed at least 2,309 people over the last year, the Lebanese government said, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced.

The majority have been killed since late September when Israel expanded its military campaign. The toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed, according to Israel.

Israel says its operation in Lebanon aims to secure the return of tens of thousands of its residents forced to flee their homes in northern Israel due to Hezbollah attacks.

Israel expanded its bombing campaign in Lebanon on Monday (October 14, 2024), killing at least 22 people — most of them women — in an airstrike in the north on a house where displaced people were seeking refuge from Israeli strikes further south, health officials said.

“What we are hearing is that amongst the 22 people killed were 12 women and two children,” U.N. human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence told the same press briefing in response to a question about Monday’s strike on Christian-majority Aitou.

“We understand it was a four-story residential building that was struck. With these factors in mind, we have real concerns with respect to IHL (International Humanitarian Law), so the laws of war, and the principles of distinction proportion and proportionality,” he said, calling for an investigation into the incident.

Rescue workers were still pulling bodies out of the rubble in Aitou on Tuesday (October 15, 2024), local media reported, following one of the deadliest strikes on displaced families in Lebanon, after strikes earlier this month on the southern Lebanese town of Ain Deleb that left more than 30 dead.

Israel has not commented on the Aitou strike, but has repeatedly said it takes all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.

U.N. concerned over peacekeeper attacks

So far the main focus of Israel’s military operations in Lebanon has been in the Bekaa Valley in the east, the suburbs of Beirut, and in the south, where U.N. peacekeepers have said that Israeli fire has hit their bases on numerous occasions and wounded peacekeepers.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday (October 14, 2024) expressed strong concern after several peacekeeping positions in southern Lebanon again came under fire amid clashes between the Israeli military and Hezbollah.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting a military base in central Israel where four soldiers were killed on Sunday (October 13, 2024) by a Hezbollah drone strike, said Israel would continue to attack the movement “without mercy, everywhere in Lebanon – including Beirut”. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah resumed a year ago when the militant group began firing rockets at Israel in support of Hamas at the start of the Gaza war.

Meanwhile, the Middle East remains on high alert for Israel to retaliate against Iran for an October 1 barrage of missiles launched in response to Israel’s assaults on Lebanon.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said Israel would listen to the United States but would decide its actions according to its own national interest.

The statement was attached to a Washington Post article which said Netanyahu had told President Joe Biden’s administration that Israel would strike Iranian military, not nuclear or oil, targets – suggesting a more limited counterstrike aimed at preventing a full-scale war.

Qatar’s emir accused Israel on Tuesday (October 15, 2024) of exploiting “international inaction” on the Middle East crisis to move beyond its “aggression” in Gaza to build more illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and send troops into Lebanon.

“Israel deliberately chose to expand the aggression to implement pre-planned schemes in other locations such as the West Bank and Lebanon because it sees that the scope for that is available,” Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani said in his annual speech to open Qatar’s Shura Council.

Qatar, the United States and Egypt have repeatedly mediated in an attempt to end the war in Gaza, which broke out a year ago when fighters from the Palestinian militant group Hamas burst into Israel from Gaza and killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 42,000 people in Gaza, turned the enclave into piles of cement and twisted metal and created severe shortages of food, water and fuel.

People gather as smoke rises from a mobile shop in Sidon, Lebanon, on September 18, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A source close to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said walkie-talkies used by group members exploded in its Beirut stronghold on Wednesday (September 18, 2024), with State media reporting similar blasts of pagers and “devices” in east and south Lebanon.

Lebanon pagers explosion: Follow highlights from September 17, 2024

“A number of walkie talkies exploded in Beirut’s southern suburbs,” the source said, with Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers confirming devices had exploded inside two cars in the area.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said pagers and “devices” had also exploded in Hezbollah strongholds in the east and south, with AFP correspondents also reporting hearing explosions..

Meanwhile, Associated Press journalists said that multiple explosions occurred at the site of a funeral for three Hezbollah members and a child killed by exploding pagers the day before.

A view shows smoke and fire on the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, after Israel said it had noted armed group Hezbollah preparing to attack Israel and had carried out pre-emptive strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon August 25.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Israeli military said its fighter jets attacked thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers in south Lebanon on Sunday morning that were aimed at northern and central Israel.

“Approximately 100 IAF fighter jets … struck and destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rocket launcher barrels that were located and embedded in southern Lebanon,” the Military said in a statement.

“Most of these launchers were aimed toward northern Israel and some were aimed toward central Israel,” they added.

Israel PM says will ‘do everything’ to restore security in north

Israel’s Civil Aviation Authority announced on Sunday (August 25, 2024) the resumption of flights to and from the country’s main international airport after a brief suspension as the Israeli military struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.

Operations at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv resumed at 7:00 am (0400 GMT), spokesman Roy Steinmetz said, adding that “planes diverted to other airports will also take off from Ben Gurion again.”