Lebanon says 23 killed in Israeli strikes on Wednesday

Smoke billows over southern Lebanon following Israeli strikes, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Lebanon said 23 people were killed and dozens injured in Israeli strikes across Lebanon on Wednesday (September 25, 2024), the third day of major Israeli raids in the country as fighting with Hezbollah has intensified.

Hezbollah earlier said it had fired a ballistic missile that reached the central Israeli city of Tel Aviv for the first time before being intercepted.

The attacks in Lebanon included two rare strikes on the villages of Joun and Maaysra — mountain areas outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in the country’s south and east.

Fatima from Maaysra, declining to provide her surname, said the targeted two-storey building was her relative’s home and housed people displaced from south Lebanon.

“They bombed an area full of displaced people,” she said. “Nowhere is safe anymore.”

An AFP correspondents at the site of the strike saw rescuers searching for survivors in the rubble of the targeted building and listening for any signs of life under the wreckage.

The village was filled with Hezbollah and Lebanese flags, he said.

Israel’s army later said it was conducting strikes in the Nabatiyeh region of south Lebanon, with the state-run National News Agency reporting an Israeli strike had partly damaged a hospital there.

Nabatiyeh Governor Howaida Turk told AFP that the region’s “only government hospital sustained damage as a result of the nearby strike”, adding that no one had been injured.

Escalating clashes

The Health Ministry said the Israeli strike on the village of Joun in the Chouf mountains, southeast of Beirut, killed four people.

Another Israeli strike killed three people in Maaysra — a Shiite-majority village in a mostly Christian mountain area about 25 kilometres (15 miles) north of Beirut.

Nine people were killed in Israeli strikes in the south and seven in eastern Lebanon, the ministry said.

Longtime foes Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in near-daily exchanges of cross-border fire since Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, sparking war in Gaza.

The focus of Israel’s firepower has shifted sharply from Gaza to Lebanon in recent days.

On Monday, Israel launched devastating strikes across Lebanon’s south and east, killing more than 550 people according to the health ministry — the deadliest single-day toll since Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.

The attacks came after coordinated explosions of communication devices killed 39 people and wounded thousands on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

Those were followed by a deadly strike on Friday on south Beirut, with leading Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil among the dead.