The death toll in Lebanon from a major outbreak of cross-border conflict between Israel and Hezbollah climbed to 558 including at least 50 children and 94 women, with more than 1 800 injured as the fighting entered a second day.
“We remain in the war and remain in the throes of the attacks. Our responsibilities have not ended,” Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad told a news conference in Beirut on Tuesday.
Abiad said four first responders were among those killed after 14 ambulances and firetrucks were hit by Israeli forces with the total number of people injured on Monday alone standing at 1 835.
Lebanese government coordinator of emergency preparedness Nasser Yassine told CNN that airstrikes had forced 16 500 people to flee their homes in the past day with 150 schools being converted into temporary shelters for the displaced.
The grim statistics came as Israel said it had completed a second wave of airstrikes across the Bekaa Valley, east of Beirut, and southern Lebanon designed to degrade Hezbollah’s capability to fire rockets into its territory.
“Among the targets belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation were buildings in which weapons were stored, command centres and additional terrorist infrastructure sites,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.
The IDF pointed to secondary explosions that it had identified as proof that “large amounts of weapons were stored in the buildings.”
Israeli fighter squadrons had flown hundreds of “attack sorties” over the past day targeting 1 500 terrorist infrastructures in the interior and south of Lebanon with almost 2 000 weapons to “remove a threat and harm the capabilities of Hezbollah,” the Israeli Air Force said in a post on X.
However, Hezbollah continued firing at Israel throughout Monday with more than 100 rockets fired at the north.
Incoming rocket sirens went off in Afula, Nazareth and other communities across northern Israel around 2:40 a.m. local time on Tuesday.
In Lebanon, reports emerged mid-afternoon local time of people injured in an airstrike on a residential block in the Beirut suburbs that was supposedly directed at the head of Hezbollah’s missile unit, the Times of Israel reported. (UPI)
