Lebanon says Israeli airstrikes kill at least 100, citizens told to evacuate

PHOTO CAPTION: Smoke billows over southern Lebanon following Israeli strikes, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, southern Lebanon September 23, 2024. REUTERS/Aziz Taher

By Maayan Lubell and Maya Gebeily

JERUSALE/BEIRUT (Reuters) -Israel unleashed its most widespread wave of airstrikes against hundreds of Hezbollah targets on Monday, killing at least 100 people by Lebanese tallies, and warned citizens to evacuate areas where it said the armed group was storing weapons.

Israel deepened its attacks after some of the heaviest cross-border exchanges of fire in almost a year of conflict, as Israel shifts its focus to its northern border, where Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel in support of its ally Hamas which is fighting a war with Israel in Gaza.

"We are deepening our attacks in Lebanon, the actions will continue until we achieve our goal to return the northern residents safely to their homes," Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video published by his office on Monday.

"These are days in which the Israeli public will have to show composure."

He was speaking after the Israeli military targeted Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon's south, eastern Bekaa valley and northern region near Syria.

Lebanon's health ministry said at least 100 people had been killed, including women, children and medics, and more than 400 wounded in Israel's strikes on Monday.

Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on X that more than 300 Hezbollah targets had been struck so far after earlier warning that airstrikes were imminent on houses in Lebanon where "Hezbollah hid weapons".

In response, Hezbollah said it had launched rockets at Israeli military posts.

The airstrikes have intensified pressure on Hezbollah, which last week suffered an attack its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah called “unprecedented in the history” of the group, after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.

The operation was widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed or denied responsibility.

In another major blow, an Israeli airstrike on Beirut's southern suburb on Friday targeted senior Hezbollah commanders, killing 45 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Hezbollah said 16 members of the group were among the dead, including senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi.

One person was slightly hurt by shrapnel from the latest rocket barrage at northern Israel, according to the Israeli ambulance service.

Imad Kreidieh, the head of Lebanese telecoms company Ogero, told Reuters on Monday that more than 80,000 automated calls asking people to evacuate their areas were detected on the network. Not all were answered.

Such calls were "psychological warfare to make havoc and chaos", he added.

On Monday, residents of southern Lebanon received calls from a Lebanese number ordering them to immediately distance themselves 1,000 metres (0.6 mile) from any post used by Hezbollah, a Reuters reporter in the south, who received the call, said.

Evacuation calls have been received on phones as far as the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

'PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR'

Lebanon's information minister Ziad Makary said his ministry had received a call ordering the building to evacuate, but said the ministry would do no such thing. "This is a psychological war," Makary told Reuters.

In the eastern Beirut district of Sassine, state employee Joseph Ghafary said he feared that Hezbollah would respond to Israel's intensified strikes and that a full-blown war would break out.

"If Hezbollah carries out a major operation, Israel will respond and destroy more than this. We can't bear it," he said.

"Israel wants to strike, it wants to keep going, meaning it is squeezing Sayyed Hassan (Nasrallah) to start a war. It is definitely dangerous."

Mohammed Sibai, a shopowner in the Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra, told Reuters that he saw the escalation in strikes as "the beginning of the war." "If they want war, what can we do? It was imposed on us. We cannot do anything," he said.

In a televised statement earlier, the Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the evacuation warning was being "distributed in Arabic on all networks and platforms in Lebanon."

Asked by reporters about a possible Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon, Hagari said "we will do whatever is needed" in order to return evacuated residents of northern Israel to their homes safely, a war priority for the Israeli government.

Hagari presented in a media briefing an aerial video of what he described as Hezbollah operatives trying to launch cruise missiles from a civilian house in Lebanon, and the subsequent Israeli strike moments before it was launched.

"Hezbollah is endangering you. Endangering you and your families," Hagari said.

LOW FLYING WARPLANES

Israeli warplanes carried out an intense wave of air strikes on towns along Lebanon’s southern border and even further north on Monday morning, according to Reuters witnesses.

A rocket hit an uninhabited mountainside east of the Lebanese port city of Byblos on Monday, a resident and Lebanese state media said, in an area that has not previously been hit by airstrikes. The area falls between Christian and Shi'ite villages.

Reuters reporters in the southern port city of Tyre could hear warplanes flying low over southern Lebanon and hear a series of airstrikes nearby.

Warplanes also carried out airstrikes on the Hermel area in northern Lebanon, Hezbollah's al-Manar reported.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, Tom Perry and Maya Gebeily and Emilie Madi in Beirut; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Stephen Coates and Sharon Singleton)