Palestinians walk near rubble and destroyed buildings, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Oct. 10.Mohammed Salem/Reuters
An Israeli air strike killed two Lebanese soldiers and wounded three on Friday, Lebanon’s military said, just hours after the Israeli military fired on the headquarters of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, injuring two of them for the second day in a row.
The incidents entangling both Lebanon’s official army – which has largely stayed on the sidelines of the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah – and the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon raised alarm as Israel broadens its campaign against Hezbollah with waves of heavy air strikes across the country and a ground invasion at the border.
In central Beirut, rescue workers combed Friday through the rubble of a collapsed building, searching for survivors of an Israeli air strike that killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens in the Lebanese capital the night before.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel over the past year in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas’s devastating Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 250 taken hostage.
In return, Israel’s military has pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, killing more than 2,229 Lebanese – including Hezbollah fighters, civilians and medical personnel – according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
That includes 60 people killed and 168 wounded by Israeli air strikes in the past 24 hours alone, the ministry said.
Hezbollah attacks have killed 29 civilians as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, both in northern Israel since October, 2023, and in southern Lebanon since Sept. 30, when Israel launched its ground invasion.
A local resident looks at an Israeli air strike at Lebanon-Israel border, South Lebanon, on Oct. 11.Goran Tomasevic/The Globe and Mail
In Gaza, thousands of people are trapped in the Jabalia refugee camp as Israeli forces attack the area, Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) said on Friday, a week after Israel launched an offensive there which it says is aimed at stopping Hamas regrouping.
Palestinian medics said Israeli military strikes killed at least 41 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Friday, with nearly half of the fatalities occurring in Jabalia, the northern district which is the largest of Gaza’s historic refugee camps.
The Israeli military says it has killed dozens of militants in Jabalia, though it remains unclear how many of the dead were civilians versus fighters.
“Nobody is allowed to get in or out; anyone who tries is getting shot,” MSF project co-ordinator Sarah Vuylsteke said on X.
Five MSF staff were trapped in Jabalia, she said.
“I don’t know what to do; at any moment we could die. People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave,” she quoted Haydar, an MSF driver, as saying.
At least 15 of the fatalities in Jabalia since dawn were owing to Israeli strikes targeting various areas, including a school sheltering displaced individuals, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said, citing medical sources.
Gaza’s Civil Defence said dozens were wounded by Israeli quadcopter fire at the same school.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has previously said that Gaza’s militants use such shelters for cover. Hamas denied this.
The Israeli military has sent troops into the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya as well as Jabalia. Hamas has said it will keep fighting Israeli forces.
Palestinian health officials have reported at least 130 deaths in the operation so far, while the military has told residents to evacuate areas where the UN estimates over 400,000 people are trapped.
United Nations officials expressed concern that the continuing Israeli offensive and evacuation orders in northern Gaza could disrupt the second phase of its polio vaccination campaign set to begin next week.
Health care officials have reported that dozens of facilities in Gaza are under evacuation orders from the Israeli military, complicating humanitarian efforts amid the continuing conflict.
Aid groups carried out an initial round of vaccinations last month after a baby was partially paralyzed by the type 2 polio virus in August, in the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
A crowd gathers at the site of an Israeli air strike, on Oct. 11 in Beirut, Lebanon.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
On Friday, the Lebanese army said an Israeli air strike hit a building near a military checkpoint in the southern Bint Jbeil province.
The Israeli military said it had been targeting Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon when reports emerged that it had hit several Lebanese army soldiers. The Israeli army said it investigated the incident but remained “unaware of any Lebanese army facilities found in the area of the strike.”
Lebanon’s army is not a party to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah – after Israel launched its ground invasion on Sept. 30, Lebanese soldiers withdrew some five kilometres from their observation posts along the border.
The only direct clash between the two national armies occurred on Oct. 3, when Israeli tank fire hit a Lebanese army post also in the area of Bint Jbeil, killing a soldier and prompting Lebanese soldiers to return fire.
Both Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers are deployed in southern Lebanon to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended a bloody monthlong 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
But Lebanon’s army is no match for Hezbollah, and neither its soldiers nor the peacekeepers have been capable of preventing the Shiite militants from entrenching themselves in the border region. Israel accuses Hezbollah of establishing militant infrastructure along the border in violation of the UN resolution.
A boy covers his mouth and nose as he walks through the rubble of the site of an Israeli air strike on Oct. 11 in Beirut.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
The Israeli military opened fire near the UN headquarters in Lebanon’s southern town of Naqoura on Friday, the army said, hitting the observation post and injuring two peacekeepers for the second time in as many days.
An initial review by the Israeli army found that soldiers in southern Lebanon targeted what they believed to be a threat located some 50 metres from the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon but ultimately struck the peacekeepers.
One of the injured peacekeepers was hospitalized in the nearby city of Tyre while the other received medical care on site, said the United Nations force, known as UNIFIL. Both were identified as Sri Lankan.
The army repeated its warning that UNIFIL personnel abandon their positions in areas where Hezbollah militants launch rockets into Israel. Following Thursday’s attack, the UN peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said 300 peacekeepers in front-line positions on southern Lebanon’s border were temporarily moved to larger bases.
In a statement condemning the strike as “a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” UNIFIL reported that explosions on Friday hit the same place they did the day before, when Israeli tank fire injured two Indonesian peacekeepers, damaged vehicles and a communication system, and drew sharp international criticism.
“Peacekeepers must be protected by all parties of the conflict, and what has happened is obviously condemnable,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said.
The French Foreign Ministry accused Israel of deliberately firing at peacekeepers and summoned the Israeli ambassador Friday in an official protest.
In a call with his Israeli counterpart, U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed the importance of ensuring the safety of UNIFIL forces and urged Israel to “pivot from military operations to a diplomatic pathway as soon as feasible,” the Pentagon said.
When President Joe Biden was questioned by reporters whether he was asking Israel to stop striking UN peacekeepers, he replied, “Absolutely, positively.”
UNIFIL, which has more than 10,000 peacekeepers from dozens of countries, was created to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after Israel’s 1978 invasion. The UN expanded its mission following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, allowing peacekeepers to patrol a buffer zone set up along the border.
A woman watches a doctor examining the wounds of her relative who has been injured in the latest Israeli air strike, on Oct. 11 in an hospital in Beirut.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
From the Burj Abi Haidar neighbourhood of central Beirut, civil defence workers dug through concrete and twisted metal from a three-storey building brought down by an Israeli air strike the day before – the deadliest Israeli air raid to hit Beirut over the past year of war.
Thursday’s air strikes hit two residential buildings in neighbourhoods that have swelled with displaced people fleeing Israeli bombardment elsewhere in Lebanon.
“The world suddenly turned upside down,” recalled Ahmad al-Khatib, a 42-year-old Lebanese postal worker who was with his wife and toddler daughter in his in-laws’ apartment when the bombs fell on the building next-door.
Mr. al-Khatib said he had pulled his 2½-year-old, Ayla, out from under the debris of a collapsed bedroom wall. The force of the explosion had flung his wife, Marwa Hamdan, against a wall and a piece of metal hit her in the head. She remains in intensive care, he said, tears running down his cheeks.
Addressing the escalating situation in the Middle East the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres urged maximum restraint on all involved to avoid an all-out war which he said would impact the world.
The Associated Press
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV channel and Israeli media reported that the strikes aimed to kill Wafiq Safa, a top security official with the group, but he was not in either targeted building at the time of the strike. The Israeli military had no comment on the reports.
Another resident, Mohammed Tarhani, said he had moved in with his brother in Burj Abi Haidar after fleeing southern Lebanon to escape air strikes in the past weeks.
“Where is one supposed to go now?” he asked.
Hezbollah kept up its rocket fire into Israel Friday as its chief spokesperson vowed to continue expanding its attacks into more populated areas deeper inside Israel.
“This is only the beginning,” Mohammed Afif told reporters from a smouldering street left in ruins by recent Israeli air strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “I tell the enemy that you have only seen the minimum.”
While disrupting life for Israelis, most of Hezbollah’s barrages have not caused casualties. But early Friday, an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon killed a man from Thailand working on a farm in northern Israel.
With a report from Reuters