A building in Ghobeiry, on the road to Beirut’s airport, was flattened on Tuesday after Israel ordered it evacuated. It was one strike in a week of widening attacks on Lebanon, and not the only one to land outside Hezbollah’s strongholds.
Without warning, Israeli strikes also hit a vehicle in Mansourieh, a mostly Christian residential area north of Beirut, and the Jnah neighbourhood in the middle of the capital. The Jnah attack came after midnight. Lebanon’s health ministry said Al-Zahraa Hospital treated “a number of those injured in the air strike”. Hassan Jalwan, who lives nearby, told AFP he heard several “big explosions”. “Nobody knows what’s happening,” he said, adding that displaced people had been sleeping in the open.
Attacks went on in Beirut’s southern suburbs and in the south, where Hezbollah is strong. In the south a strike on a health facility killed a paramedic. At least seven people died in the south that day, the ministry said, and 53 health workers have been killed since the war began. Israel’s military said it hit Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut and killed a senior commander and another senior figure.
How the war reached Lebanon
Hezbollah entered the regional war on 2 March by firing missiles at Israel, days after the US and Israel attacked its ally Iran on 28 February. Israeli troops have since pushed into southern Lebanon.
The Lebanese army pulled out of its last positions in the south, leaving the villages of Ain Ibel and Rmeish a day after an Israeli air strike on an army checkpoint killed a soldier. The Israeli military had not commented on the death. Some residents refused to go. In Rmeish, Father Najib Al Amil said in a video: “We rely on God and will stay in our village. We either all die together and lose our land or live and our villages will live with us.”
A buffer zone to the Litani
Israel has said it will take control of a large stretch of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, about 30km from the border, as a buffer zone. Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel would hold security control there after the war ends. More than 600,000 displaced Lebanese would be “completely prohibited” from returning until northern Israel is safe, he said, and houses in border villages would be destroyed “according to the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza”. The UN has criticised the plan, and the Lebanese government called it a violation of sovereignty.
Lebanon’s health ministry put the number killed since the attacks began at 1,268. The UN reports more than one million people displaced. Israeli strikes on bridges and other infrastructure have cut supply lines, leaving southern villages uninhabitable. South Lebanon lived under Israeli occupation for nearly 18 years, from 1982 to 2000.
