Death toll from two days of Israeli strikes reaches 558, Lebanon says
Israel says at least 75 rockets were fired from Lebanon in the second day of escalation.
Lebanon’s health ministry has said the death toll from Israeli airstrikes in the country since early on Monday has reached 558, including 50 children and 94 women.
Health minister Firass Abiad told reporters on Tuesday that 1,835 people were wounded during the same period and were taken to 54 hospitals around Lebanon.
Mr Abiad added that four paramedics were among those killed, and 16 paramedics and firefighters were among the wounded.
Israel’s military said 75 rockets were fired from Lebanon into northern Israel on Tuesday, with some starting fires and damaging buildings in the country’s north.
It is the second day of much-intensified hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Rocket sirens blared throughout the morning in Israel’s north. Video circulating on Israeli media showed explosions on the highway, with drivers pulling over and lying on the ground next to their vehicles.
The rockets came in five volleys throughout the morning, the largest of them containing 50 rockets toward the Upper Galilee area. The military said it had struck the launchers where the rockets were fired. Another heavily-targeted area was southeast of the Israeli city of Haifa.
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it launched missiles overnight at eight sites in Israel, including an explosives factory in Zichron, 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the border.
Galilee Medical Centre, a northern Israel hospital, said two patients arrived at the hospital with minor head injuries from a rocket falling near their car.
Several others were being treated for light wounds from running to shelters and traffic accidents when alarms sounded.
Hezbollah has been sending heavy volleys of rockets into Israel as Israel intensifies its operation in Lebanon.
On Monday, Israel’s military ordered the south of Lebanon to be evacuated.
On Tuesday, the Lebanese health ministry said Israeli strikes had killed 558 people, including 50 children.
The Israeli military says it has no immediate plans for a ground invasion but is prepared for one, after moving thousands of troops who had been serving in Gaza to the northern border. It says Hezbollah has launched some 9,000 rockets and drones into Israel since last October, including 250 on Monday alone.
The military said Israeli warplanes struck 1,600 Hezbollah targets on Monday, destroying cruise missiles, long and short-range rockets and attack drones, including weapons concealed in private homes.
Israeli military officials said they carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut without giving details. Lebanon’s National News Agency said “a number of people” were wounded by the strike, which destroyed three floors of a six-story apartment building.
Lebanon’s health ministry said six people were killed and 15 were wounded in the strike in a southern suburb, an area where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
Lebanese families displaced from villages farther south slept in shelters hastily set up in schools in Beirut and the coastal city of Sidon.
Some who did not find shelter elsewhere slept in cars and parks and on a seaside road.
Monday’s heavy bombardment sent thousands fleeing from south Lebanon. Hotels in Beirut were quickly booked to capacity and apartments in the mountains surrounding the capital were snapped up by families seeking safe accommodations.
Some offered up empty apartments or rooms in their houses in social media posts, while volunteers set up a kitchen at an empty gas station in Beirut to cook meals for the displaced.
In the eastern city of Baalbek, the state-run National News Agency reported that lines formed at bakeries and gas stations as residents rushed to stock up on essential supplies in anticipation of another round of strikes on Tuesday.
In Israel, the US embassy in Jerusalem restricted American government employees from travelling to Israel’s north after a heavy exchange of fire between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group.
The embassy said on Tuesday that employees require an armoured vehicle and prior approval to travel to a large region of the north that includes the bustling coastal city of Haifa.
The US State Department meanwhile urged American citizens to leave the country.
On Tuesday afternoon Israel’s military said 10 more rockets from Lebanon were fired into Israeli territory, injuring a reservist and raining shrapnel onto a road in northern Israel.
The rockets came in two volleys, the first targeting the Upper Galilee area and the second an area south of Haifa known as Eliakim. Rocket fragments from a rocket that was intercepted injured the Israeli soldier, the military said.
Hezbollah said it had fired middle-range rockets at an Israeli army position in Eliakim.
Israel’s military has now said that there have been at least 110 rockets fired into Israeli territory from Lebanon since Tuesday morning.
A journalist working for the pan-Arab network Al-Mayadeen was killed in Israeli airstrikes while he was at his home in southern Lebanon, the network said on Tuesday.
Hadi Al-Sayyed, 22, is the third journalist from the network killed in the ongoing conflict between the Israeli military and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group. The network said he was wounded on Monday and died of his wounds on Tuesday.
According to the TV station, Al-Sayyed worked for the Al-Mayadeen’s online section and was at his house in the town of Burj Rahhal near the southern city of Tyre when it was hit in the airstrike.
Last November, Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent Farah Omar and cameraman Rabih Al-Maamari were killed in an Israeli strike while covering southern Lebanon.
The UN refugee agency in Lebanon said a Lebanese woman who had been working for the agency for 12 years, one of her sons and a cleaner employed by the agency were also killed in Israeli airstrikes on Monday.
The building where Dina Darwiche lived with her family was hit in a strike on Lebanon’s Bekaa region, UNHCR said.
Her husband and another child were seriously injured.
Her body and that of her younger son were recovered from the rubble on Tuesday.
Ali Basma, who worked as a cleaner for the agency for seven years, was killed in a separate strike in the south. He worked at UNHCR’s office in the city of Tyre.
The UN refugee agency said it was “outraged and deeply saddened by the killing of two beloved members of the UNHCR family in Lebanon”.
It said the protection of civilians is a must under international humanitarian law.
