After Rare Warning, Israel Bombards Lebanon

At least 180 are dead after latest Israeli airstrikes, hundreds wounded
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 23, 2024 9:50 AM CDT
Israeli Strike on Lebanon Is Deadliest in a Year
Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike on the village of Kfar Rouman in Lebanon on Monday.   (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Israeli strikes killed more than 180 Lebanese people on Monday in the deadliest and most intense barrage in nearly a year, per the AP. The Israeli military warned residents in southern and eastern Lebanon to evacuate their homes ahead of time, the first such Israeli warning of its kind in Lebanon, reports NBC News. Thousands of Lebanese fled the south, and the main highway out of the southern port city of Sidon was jammed with cars heading toward Beirut in the biggest exodus since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. More than 400 other people were injured in the strikes.

The Israeli military announced that it hit some 300 targets Monday, saying it was going after Hezbollah weapons sites. Some strikes hit in residential areas of towns in the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley. One strike hit a wooded area as far away as Byblos in central Lebanon, more than 80 miles from the border north of Beirut. The military said it was expanding the airstrikes to include areas of the Bekaa Valley, along Lebanon's eastern border. Hezbollah has long had an established presence in the Bekaa Valley, which runs along the Lebanese-Syrian border, and it's where the group was founded in 1982 with the help of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah said that it fired dozens of rockets at an Israeli military post in Galilee. It also targeted for a second day the facilities of the Rafael defense firm, headquartered in Haifa. The increasing strikes and counterstrikes have raised fears of an all-out war, even as Israel is still battling Hamas in Gaza and trying to return scores of hostages taken in Hamas' Oct. 7 attack. Hezbollah has vowed to continue its strikes in solidarity with the Palestinians and Hamas, a fellow Iran-backed militant group. Israel says it's committed to returning calm to its northern border.

(More Lebanon stories.)

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