ShareBEIRUT: Zionist air strikes killed at least 356 people, including 24 children, in Lebanon on Monday, the Lebanese government said, in the deadliest cross-border escalation since the Gaza war erupted. Arab states sharply condemned the Zionist entity over the sharpest escalation in nearly a year of Zionist-Hezbollah hostilities.
The Zionist entity said it hit about 1,300 Hezbollah sites in southern and eastern Lebanon in 24 hours, including a “targeted strike” in Beirut. A source close to Hezbollah said the strike in the Lebanese capital targeted Ali Karake, the group’s third in command. State media reported new raids in eastern Lebanon, while Hezbollah said it targeted five sites in the Zionist entity. In the coastal city of Haifa, Zionists were seen running for cover when air raid sirens sounded.
The strikes by the “(Zionist) enemy” in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa and Baalbek in the east “killed 356 people, including 24 children and 42 women, and injured 1,246”, said the health ministry. Health Minister Firass Abiad said “thousands of
families” had been displaced. “We sleep and wake up to bombardment... that’s what our life has become,” said Wafaa Ismail, 60, a housewife from the southern village of Zawtar.
World powers implored the Zionist entity and Hezbollah to pull back from the brink of all-out war, with the focus of violence shifting sharply from the Zionist entity’s southern front with Gaza to its northern border with Lebanon. Egypt — a key mediator in the Gaza conflict — urged the UN Security Council to intervene following the Zionist entity’s “dangerous escalation”, while Iraq appealed for an urgent meeting of Arab states on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Zionist army chief Herzi Halevi said the strikes hit combat infrastructure Hezbollah had been building for two decades. Zionist Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Monday “a significant peak” in the operation. Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Zionist entity was acting to change the “security balance” in the north by preempting threats.
Explosions near the ancient city of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon sent smoke billowing into the sky. Hezbollah, a powerful political and military force in Lebanon, has exchanged near-daily fire with the Zionist entity in support for its Palestinian ally Hamas. Its deputy chief, Naim Qassem, said Sunday the group was in a “new phase, namely an open reckoning” with the Zionist entity and was ready for “all military possibilities”.
He spoke after Hezbollah said it fired rockets at military sites near Haifa and later launched “dozens of rockets” at two Zionist bases “in response to the (Zionist) enemy’s attacks on the south and the Bekaa”. The attack came after a Zionist strike on southern Beirut Friday killed its elite Radwan Force commander, Ibrahim Aqil, and coordinated communications device blasts that Hezbollah aLebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati urged the United Nations and world powers to deter what he called the Zionist entity’s “plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns”. US President Joe Biden, whose country is the Zionist entity’s main ally and weapons supplier, said his country was “working to de-escalate in a way that allows people to return home safely”.
The Pentagon said it was sending a small number of additional US military personnel to the Middle East after thousands were deployed earlier alongside warships, fighter jets and air defense systems. UN chief Antonio Guterres was “gravely alarmed” by civilian casualties in Lebanon his spokesman said. The United Nations peacekeeping force in south Lebanon warned “any further escalation of this dangerous situation could have far-reaching and devastating consequences”.
Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, accused the Zionist entity of seeking “to create this wider conflict”. The Zionist entity’s military offensive has killed at least 41,455 people in Gaza, most of them civilians. – Agencies
