Israel continues to climb steps in its military escalation over Lebanon and this Thursday has bombed a residential building in a suburb of Beirut, the capital. The aggression, which according to the Qatari newspaper Al Araby Al Jadeed has caused one fatality and multiple injuries, advances in dismantling the ceasefire that the United States imposed in April between Israel and the Shiite party-militia Hezbollah.
That truce had as one of its main pillars safeguarding Beirut and its surroundings from new attacks. The aggression, which the Israeli army has described as “precision,” takes place the day before Lebanon and Israel resume negotiations in Washington to try to make the ceasefire hold.
Further south, Israel continues with a large-scale offensive it has maintained since Tuesday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu anticipated that he had ordered to “step on the accelerator” against the pro-Iranian organization. Since then, the hostilities of the Israeli troops are causing dozens of fatalities daily, and they have ordered the complete evacuation of everything remaining south of the Zahrani River.
This is a waterway located 40 kilometers from Israel, north of an area equivalent to 14% of Lebanon, where there are about 300 municipalities and where Israel has maintained daily attacks despite the truce.
That southern region, which Israel considered on Wednesday as a “combat zone” and which includes cities such as the millenary Tyre (about 200,000 residents) or Nabatie, has seen a new exodus in recent days amid bombings, in a country where 1.2 million people (a quarter of the national population) were already displaced before the recent escalation. The Lebanese newspaper l’Orient Today estimates that Israel has launched attacks on 39 municipalities in the last hours.
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Tyre and its surroundings, where Palestinian refugee camps are located and where thousands of forcibly displaced people from the border villages are hosted, have received a dozen attacks since Wednesday night. Tension remained high during the early morning.
The Arabic spokesperson for the Israeli troops, Avichay Adraee, issued two statements on his social networks at three in the morning warning of imminent bombings against specific buildings, at a time when the offensive had already partially damaged the electrical networks and internet connection. Two hours later, a burst of seven bombings shook the city at dawn, in a rather empty city after most had left the day before.
The Ministry of Health has reported eleven fatalities in several attacks on the Tyre area, including three dead and 37 injured, among them eight children and 13 women, in an attack on Al-Bass, east of the municipality. Further north, in Adloun, a village 39 kilometers from the border, the ministry denounces a bombing against a vehicle that killed six people, including two children, their father, and their mother. The Lebanese state news agency had previously reported “a massacre” in the area, where “a drone attacked a family while trying to flee the villages threatened” by Israel.
