As U.S. diplomat Amos Hochstein visited the region to push for a ceasefire, Israel struck Beirut’s southern suburbs and the eastern Bekaa region, and a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon killed a man in northern Israel.

Israel Strikes Across Lebanon After Ordering Evacuations of Southern Towns

The wide-scale bombardment continued a day after a U.S. envoy held talks with Israeli officials on a possible cease-fire with Hezbollah militants.

by · NY Times

Israel pressed on with its bombardment of Lebanon on Friday after issuing widespread evacuation warnings in the country’s south, as its conflict with Hezbollah militants showed no sign of abating despite a U.S.-led push for a cease-fire.

The Israeli military launched “a series of raids” on the Dahiya, the area near Beirut that is in effect controlled by Hezbollah, a military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Friday afternoon. The area, once home to a large civilian population, has been a frequent target of Israeli strikes since the war began and has been hit especially hard in recent days.

Other strikes, which came as Lebanon celebrated its independence day, hit near the southern port city of Tyre, after calls by the Israeli military for civilians to evacuate entire towns in the area and flee more than 20 miles north.

Lebanon’s health ministry said two separate Israeli strikes in the south had killed five paramedics.

Lebanon’s health system has sustained 126 attacks this year that have killed 223 health workers and injured 183 others, Abdinasir Abubakar, the U.N. World Health Organization’s representative in Lebanon, told reporters on Friday. The majority of these casualties have occurred in attacks on ambulances, he said.

Analysts say Israel’s ramped-up strikes across Lebanon are intended to pressure Hezbollah into agreeing to a cease-fire on terms that are favorable to Israel. Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s point man in the quest to end the war, discussed the terms of a possible deal with Israeli officials on Thursday during a visit to Israel.

U.S. and Israeli officials have provided few details in public about the terms of a deal. An Israeli official said on Friday that there was “cautious optimism” in Israel about the prospect of finalizing the terms in the coming days. A Lebanese official briefed on the talks said that the ball was in Israel’s court, and that Lebanon’s government remained “realistic” that a cease-fire could still fail to materialize. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Mr. Hochstein earlier this week held two days of discussions with Lebanese officials in Beirut, which he said had made progress. Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said that Hezbollah had responded to the U.S. proposal and that a truce depended on the “seriousness” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

But Israel and Hezbollah have both pledged to keep fighting during the negotiations, and the violence appears only to have intensified.

Bachir Khodr, the head of the Baalbek-Hermel governorate in eastern Lebanon, said Israeli strikes had killed nearly 50 people in his province on Thursday. The attacks struck more than a dozen towns and villages, he said on social media, describing it as some of the most violent bombardment of the war.

Damaged after an Israeli strike in the neighborhood of Shayyah in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday.
Credit...Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

At least 10 of those killed were from the village of Flaoui, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The state-run news agency reported that children were among the dead in that village.

Hussein Awada, a driver who fled his home in the Dahiya weeks ago, said he had returned to the area on Friday to collect some money from a friend. “I spent all I have,” he said.

Unable to afford cellphone data, he was unaware that Israel had issued an evacuation warning for the neighborhood, and he escaped just minutes before a building was leveled in an Israeli strike, he said. The human rights group Amnesty International has criticized the evacuation warnings as inadequate, in part because they are issued only on social media.

“I passed by it almost every day,” he said of the building that was hit. “It’s a business center, as far as I know. Doctors. Lawyers. Travel agencies.”

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September, nearly a year after the group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, which like Hezbollah is backed by Iran. The conflict has killed more than 3,500 people in Lebanon and displaced almost a quarter of the population. It is now the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

The fighting in southern Lebanon appears to have escalated in recent days as the Israeli military has conducted deeper raids into Lebanese territory. Hezbollah said on Friday that it had repeatedly attacked Israeli troops near Khiam, a large southern town where Israel has made a renewed push over the past week.

In Chamaa, another town in the south where Israel has been conducting deeper incursions, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said four peacekeepers from Italy were injured when its base in the town came under fire for the third time in the past week.

The base was struck by two rockets, which UNIFIL said were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups.”

Here are other developments:

  • Gaza hospital: The Israeli military struck Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza overnight, injuring six medical workers, destroying the hospital’s main generator and damaging water tanks, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The hospital, one of the last that is still functioning in the north of the territory, has been struck repeatedly during a weekslong Israeli offensive there, according to the health ministry and doctors who work there. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
  • Aid workers killed: The United Nations said that at least 281 aid workers have been killed worldwide in 2024, more than recorded in any other year. It said the war in Gaza was driving the numbers higher and had cost the lives of at least 10 aid workers so far this month.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

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