Israeli air and drone strikes killed at least 11 people, including two children and two medics, in southern Lebanon early on Monday, Lebanese state media reported, in the latest violence to test a US-brokered framework agreement signed in June.
Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli warplanes struck a residential building in the town of Kfar Reman before dawn, killing nine people, among them two children, and wounding five others. In a separate attack in the same town, an Israeli drone hit a civilian vehicle, killing the two medics travelling inside it.
Overnight, Israeli forces also struck a residential area in Deir al-Zahrani, another town in southern Lebanon, after issuing a forced evacuation order beforehand. The Israeli military said it had targeted a building close to a Hezbollah facility, which it alleged had been used to launch an explosive drone, reports Al Jazeera.
Monday’s deaths follow a similar attack a day earlier on the nearby town of Arab Salim, also in the Nabatieh district, in which at least seven people were killed and 20 wounded.
The violence has continued despite the framework agreement reached between Israel and Lebanon in June, which established a “pilot zone” scheme intended to allow the Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah in designated areas in return for an Israeli withdrawal.
According to Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Kfar Reman, Israeli forces continue to occupy dozens of villages in southern Lebanon and have refused to withdraw further, leaving the diplomatic process “stalled”.
Khodr said residents who had begun returning home and rebuilding after June’s deal were now gripped by “uncertainty and fear” following a fresh wave of Israeli attacks over the past 48 hours. “The feeling here is that Israel is trying to impose or establish new rules of engagement,” she said, adding that civilians were being killed and residential homes destroyed.
She said civil defence workers had been working through the night at the scene of the strikes, but that the operation was no longer one of rescue. “It’s a recovery operation,” Khodr said.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon have killed more than 4,350 people and wounded over 12,300 since the conflict escalated in early March, according to figures from Lebanon’s Health Ministry. In a report issued last Wednesday, the ministry said there had been 179 Israeli attacks on Lebanese ambulance crews since 2 March, killing 135 healthcare workers.
Although the US-brokered agreement has seen overall levels of violence decline, Israeli forces have continued to raze villages inside what it terms a “security zone” in southern Lebanon, carrying out air strikes both within the zone and further north, most often without issuing forced evacuation orders beforehand.
