At least 15 dead and dozens injured in Israeli airstrikes in Beirut – The Irish Times

At least 15 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the Lebanese capital as diplomats tried to negotiate a ceasefire. LebanonThe Ministry of Health reported that 63 people were injured in the strikes, with a fourth injured in the central region in less than a week.

The escalation came after U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein traveled to the region this week in an attempt to broker a ceasefire agreement ending more than 13 months of fighting between Israel AND Hezbollahwhich has escalated into a full-blown war over the past two months.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, Israeli bombings in Lebanon killed more than 3,500 people and injured more than 15,000. This resulted in the displacement of approximately 1.2 million, or a quarter of Lebanon’s population. On the Israeli side, approximately 90 soldiers and nearly 50 civilians have been killed by rockets, drones and missiles in northern Israel and during fighting in Lebanon.

Israel’s war against Hamas shows no signs of abating either. Gaza’s health ministry said multiple attacks in the north of the enclave killed at least 80 people between Thursday and Friday, including at Kamal Adwan and Al-Ahli hospitals. Several dozen people are still trapped under the rubble, he added. The attacks occurred at 4:00 a.m. local time, destroying an eight-story building and leaving a crater in the ground.

Also on Saturday, a drone strike in the southern port city of Tire killed two people and injured three, according to the state-run National News Agency. Hezbollah spokesman Amin Shiri said Saturday that the targeted building was a residential building and no Hezbollah officials were inside.

Mohammed Bikai, spokesman for the Palestinian Fatah faction in the Tire area, said the dead were Palestinian refugees and fishermen living in the nearby al-Rashidieh camp. Despite a warning issued last month by the Israeli army telling people not to fish along Lebanon’s southern coast, Bikai said Palestinians continued to go to sea. “You can’t tell someone who has to eat that you can’t fish,” he said.

The Israeli army did not issue a warning to residents against strikes in central Beirut and did not comment on the victims. On Saturday, he warned residents of parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs that they lived near Hezbollah facilities that the army would target in the near future. The warning published on website X told people to evacuate to a distance of at least 500 meters.

The army said it carried out intelligence-led attacks over the past day on Hezbollah targets in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah has a strong presence. He said he hit several command centers and weapons depots.

On Saturday, strikes also continued in the Gaza Strip. At least six people were killed, half of them children and two women, according to Associated Press reporters and staff at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.

After the attack, AP reporters saw people mourning what appeared to be a man’s lifeless body and bloody children helping each other out of the wreckage.

According to local health officials, the death toll from fighting in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas has surpassed 44,000 this week. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its statistics, but says more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 fighters, without providing evidence.

The war began when Hamas-led militants entered southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping another 250. About 100 hostages remain in Gaza, at least a third of whom are presumed dead. . Most of the rest were released during the ceasefire last year.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has caused heavy damage to large areas of the coast, leaving many wondering when and how it will ever be rebuilt. About 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million people have been displaced, often multiple times, and hundreds of thousands live in squalid tent camps with little food, water or basic services.