BEIRUT — Fighting has escalated at the Israeli-Lebanese border, as Israeli strikes killed nearly 500 people largely in southern Lebanon on Monday, according to Lebanese health authorities.
Analysts have called it the largest campaign of Israeli aerial strikes against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia, since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Lebanon's Health Ministry has raised the death toll to 492, including 35 children, as well as 1,645 people injured in the Israeli attacks.
Israel and Hezbollah have been trading attacks back and forth across the Israeli-Lebanese border since the war in Gaza began in October last year. Hezbollah's leadership says it is acting out of solidarity with Palestinians and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel says it is fighting Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to prevent an assault in northern Israel similar to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel. Israel wants to degrade Hezbollah's rocket-launching capabilities, push Hezbollah fighters away from the border and allow Israeli families who evacuated the northern region to return home, as NPR's Daniel Estrin reported on Morning Edition.
Israel says it hit Hezbollah's rockets
The Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Israeli forces struck 1,300 Hezbollah targets and destroyed cruise missiles, short-range rockets, attack drones and other weaponry.
Strikes damaged several buildings inside populated areas in Lebanon's south as well as farther east in the country's Bekaa Valley, but at least one landed some 80 miles north of the border near the city of Byblos, according to Lebanon's state-run broadcaster.
Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel in recent days, following the explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members last week, which killed dozens of people and injured thousands, across Lebanon and in parts of Syria. Israel has not publicly acknowledged a role in the blasts. But a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR that Israel notified Washington it carried out last Tuesday's attacks in Lebanon.
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Hezbollah's leadership said in a statement Monday it was targeting dozens of rockets at an Israeli military post in northern Israel. Residents in the city of Nazareth told NPR it was a "scary night" into early Monday morning, with "rockets and interceptions over us all night."
Israeli authorities acknowledged there were repeated air raid sirens in the country's north, indicating incoming rocket fire from Lebanon.
On Friday, an airstrike over the Lebanese capital city, Beirut, killed at least 50 Hezbollah fighters and civilians, including children. Israel's military said that the strike had targeted a senior Hezbollah commander.
Israel warned Lebanese to evacuate
Across villages and towns in southern Lebanon, residents have been departing for safer parts of the country farther from the border. Several months ago, Israeli military officials ordered residents living in communities on the Israeli side of that border to also evacuate as skirmishes and tit-for-tat missile barrages intensified.
Early Friday, Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, warned people living in southern and eastern Lebanon to leave their homes, as the air campaign against Hezbollah's fighters and positions increased and widened.
Residents in southern regions received messages in Arabic instructing them to move away from known weapons storage sites controlled by Hezbollah, according to Lebanese news reports. Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary criticized the messages as "part of the psychological warfare of intimidation adopted by the Israeli enemy."
News images from the area showed cars filling the main road out of the southern city of Sidon, northward up the coastline toward Beirut, even as some Israeli airstrikes continued to land dozens of miles inside Lebanese territory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later called for people in Lebanon to heed Israel's warning if they received a message to evacuate their homes. “Please get out of harm’s way now,” Netanyahu said in a video recording.
Calls for diplomacy
The United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said on social media it has “grave concern for the safety of civilians in southern Lebanon amidst the most intense Israeli bombing campaign since last October.” The group called for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.
Egypt also called for diplomacy in a statement condemning what it said was a "dangerous Israeli escalation in Lebanon."
And Turkey warned that "Israel's attacks on Lebanon mark a new phase in its efforts to drag the entire region into chaos."
Their remarks came as world leaders gather in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly.
President Biden said he and other leaders are "working to de-escalate in a way that allows people to return home safely."
Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said, "in light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel" to the region, but didn't provide specifics.
The Pentagon said it supports Israel's right to defend itself and that it also is promoting diplomatic means to resolve regional tensions.
For more coverage and analysis, go to npr.org/mideastupdates.
Willem Marx wrote from London and Jane Arraf reported from Beirut. Daniel Estrin contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel, and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed from London.
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