Israel launches heavy strikes on Beirut suburbs as defence minister rules out ceasefire talks

The Israeli military pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs with air strikes on Tuesday, mounting one of its heaviest daytime attacks yet on the Hizbullah-controlled area after the defence minister ruled out a ceasefire until Israeli goals were met.
Smoke billowed over Beirut as around a dozen strikes hit the southern suburbs from midmorning. An Israeli army warning posted on social media told residents they were near Hizbullah facilities. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
In northern Israel, people were forced to take shelter as attack drones were launched from Lebanon, the military said. One hit the yard of a kindergarten in a Haifa suburb, where the children had been rushed into a shelter, rescue workers said. None were hurt.
An Israeli strike killed five people in the village of Baalchmay some 15km southeast of Beirut, Lebanon’s health ministry said. Another person was killed in an Israeli strike in Hermel, in northeastern Lebanon, it said.
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Beirut residents have largely fled the southern suburbs since Israel began bombing it in September.
Ignited by the Gaza war, the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Hizbullah had been rumbling on for a year before Israel went on the offensive in September, pounding wide areas of Lebanon with air strikes and sending troops into the south.
Israel has dealt Hizbullah heavy blows, killing many of its leaders including Hassan Nasrallah, flattening large areas of the southern suburbs, destroying border villages in the south, and striking more widely across Lebanon.
Since hostilities erupted a year ago, Israeli attacks have killed more than 3,200 people in Lebanon, the majority in the last seven weeks, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Its figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Hizbullah attacks have killed about 100 civilians and soldiers in northern Israel, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon over the last year.
The Israeli military said the air force struck around 100 Hizbullah targets in Lebanon, including infrastructure, weapons storage facilities, dozens of militants, and launchers that fired projectiles toward Israel.
Israel’s new defence minister Israel Katz said on Monday there would be no ceasefire in Lebanon until Israel achieves its goals.
“Israel will not agree to any arrangement that does not guarantee Israel’s right to enforce and prevent terrorism on its own, and meet the goals of the war in Lebanon – disarming Hizbullah and its withdrawal beyond the Litani river and returning the residents of the north safely to their homes,” he said.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar had said earlier on Monday there had been “a certain progress” in ceasefire talks but that the war was not yet over and the main challenge facing any ceasefire deal would be enforcement.
The Lebanese government, which includes Hizbullah, has repeatedly called for a ceasefire based on the full implementation of a United Nations Resolution that ended a war between the group and Israel in 2006.
The resolution calls for the area south of the Litani to be free of all weapons other than those of the Lebanese state. Lebanon and Israel have accused each other of violating the resolution.
Israel’s offensive has driven more than 1 million people from their homes in Lebanon, causing a humanitarian crisis.
Hizbullah rocket fire into northern Israel has forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate the area over the last year.
Elsewhere in the region on Tuesday, the Israeli military said it had delivered hundreds of packets of food to cut-off areas of northern Gaza as fighting raged ahead of a US deadline for Israel to get more aid into the Palestinian enclave or face cuts in military assistance.
Palestinian medics said at least 37 people had been killed in Israeli strikes in several parts of the Gaza Strip overnight and into Tuesday, including 10 people killed in a house in Beit Hanoun and two others in the nearby town of Beit Lahiya.
Four Israeli soldiers were killed in northern Gaza, the military said.
Later on Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed 11 Palestinians in Rafah, medics said. A strike on a house in the Gaza City suburb of Sabra killed a Hamas leader in the city, Waleed Aweida, and his granddaughter. Three other people including his wife were still under the rubble.
For more than a month, Israeli troops have been laying siege to the northern end of Gaza in a push the military says is aimed at squeezing out Hamas militants reforming in the area around the town of Jabalia.
The military says it has killed or captured hundreds of fighters but Israel has faced growing international pressure over the disastrous humanitarian situation facing civilians who have been largely cut off from aid for weeks.
“We are witnessing alarming cases of malnutrition among both children and adults. We are struggling to provide even one meal a day for our hospital workers amid severe food and medical supply shortages,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
Last week, a committee of global food security experts warned of a strong likelihood that famine was imminent in certain areas of northern Gaza, a claim which Israel rejected.
Outgoing US president Joe Biden has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. But as the toll from Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza has mounted, relations with prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government have been increasingly fraught.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than 2 million Gazans seek shelter as best they can. – Reuters