BEIRUT/TEL AVIV: Israel carried out its heaviest strikes on Lebanon since the conflict with Hezbollah broke out last month, even as the Iran-aligned group paused attacks on northern Israel and Israeli troops in Lebanon under a two-week US-Iran ceasefire.
Consecutive explosions shook Beirut, sending smoke billowing across the capital, as Israel’s military said it had launched the largest coordinated strike of the war.
More than 100 Hezbollah command centres and military sites were targeted in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon, it said. The strikes killed 112 people and wounded 837 across the country, Lebanon’s health ministry said. In Beirut, Reuters reporters saw people on motorcycles picking up wounded and transporting them to hospitals because there were not enough ambulances to get them in time.
A group of firefighters worked to put out flames in a car park after one strike left more than a dozen cars scorched and mangled.
The head of Lebanon’s syndicate of doctors, Elias Chlela, called in a written statement for “all physicians from all specialities” to head to any hospital they could to offer help. One of Beirut’s biggest hospitals said it was in need of donations of all blood types.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said overnight that the ceasefire suspending the six-week-old US-Israeli war against Iran did not apply to Lebanon, and the Israeli military said operations against Hezbollah there would continue.
That position contradicted comments by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a key intermediary in the US-Iran ceasefire talks, who had said the truce would include Lebanon.
In a statement, Hezbollah condemned what it called Israel’s “barbaric aggression” and said the attacks underscored its “natural and legal right to resist the occupation and respond to its aggression.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned the US and Israel it would deliver a “regret-inducing response” if attacks on Lebanon did not stop.
Israel had also carried out strikes across southern Lebanon earlier in the day, including artillery shelling and a dawn airstrike on a building near a hospital that killed four people, Lebanon’s state news agency NNA reported. A strike on the southern city of Sidon killed eight people and wounded 22 others, Lebanon’s health ministry said. A further strike hit central Beirut in the early evening, NNA reported. The Israeli military said it attacked a Hezbollah commander in Beirut, without providing further details.
Hezbollah stopped attacking Israeli targets early on Wednesday, three Lebanese sources close to the group told Reuters. The group’s last public statement on its military activity was posted at 1 a.m. (2200 GMT Tuesday), saying it had targeted Israeli troops inside Lebanon on Tuesday evening.
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