BEIRUT (AP) — At least 18 people were killed Monday when an Israeli airstrike hit an apartment building in northern Lebanon, the Lebanese Red Cross said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, and it was not clear what the target was. The airstrike hit a small apartment building in the village of Ait, far from the Hezbollah militant group’s main strongholds in the south and east of the country.
A Palestinian man reacts to a fire as an Israeli military attack hits a tent area in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel)・Kareem Hana)
The airstrike came a day after a Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in northern Israel. Four soldiers, all 19, were killed and seven others seriously injured in the extremist group’s deadliest airstrike since Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon. 2 weeks ago.
A total of 61 people were injured in Sunday’s attack. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets, missiles and drones into Israel over the past year, most of which were intercepted or attacked in the open, disrupting daily life but causing few casualties. Not yet.
Strike and hell in Gaza’s hospital courtyard
Even as attention has shifted to Lebanon, Israel continues to hold its own, more than a year after its October 7 attack in southern Israel sparked a war there and sparked escalation across the region. Fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah and Hamas are allies and both receive support from Iran.
An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and set off a fire that gutted a tent camp for war-displaced people, leaving more than 20 people with severe burns.
The Israeli military said, without providing evidence, that the Gaza attack targeted militants hiding among civilians. In recent months, Hamas fighters have repeatedly raided crowded shelters and tent camps, claiming they are using them as bases for attacks.
Palestinians inspect the damage at a tent site in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital following Israeli shelling in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Monday, October 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Abdel) Kareem Hana)
Palestinians react to a fire after an Israeli attack in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip, October 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
Palestinian firefighters try to extinguish a fire caused by an Israeli military attack in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, October 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel)・Kareem Hana)
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah caught fire in an early morning airstrike, leaving at least 20 people dead and scores already injured in an earlier airstrike on a school-turned-shelter. He was struggling with treatment. Lots of tents.
Several secondary explosions were heard after the initial attack, but it was not immediately clear whether they were from weapons or fuel tanks.
An Israeli Apache helicopter fires a missile from northern Israel toward southern Lebanon, Sunday, October 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Associated Press footage showed children among the injured. The man sobbed as he held the toddler in his arms, his head bandaged. Another small child with a bandaged leg received a blood transfusion on the floor of a crowded hospital.
According to hospital records, four people were killed and 40 injured. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said 25 people suffered severe burns and were taken to Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.
An Israeli soldier displays what is believed to be the entrance to a Hezbollah tunnel in southern Lebanon, October 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)
Israeli soldiers during a ground operation in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel, Sunday, October 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Sam McNeil)
The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250 hostages by Palestinian militants. About 100 people are still being held in Gaza, and one-third of them are thought to have died.
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 42,000 Palestinians were killed in Israel’s retaliatory attacks, with more than half of the dead being women and children, although it did not say how many were fighters. Approximately 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been repeatedly displaced by the war, and large swaths of the coast have been completely destroyed.
Israeli rights group warns of forced deportations in northern Gaza
Israel has ordered all of the estimated 400,000 remaining residents of the northern third of Gaza to evacuate to the south, and since the beginning of this month has banned food from entering the north. Hundreds of thousands of people in the north complied with Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war but have not been allowed to return.
For this reason, there is a sense among Palestinians that Israel has no intention of carrying out the plan devised by the former general to order all civilians to leave northern Gaza and label those who remain as fighters. There are growing concerns about this. The plan is a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say violates the international community. Law.
The plan has been submitted to the Israeli government, but it is unclear whether it has been adopted. The military says it has not received any such orders.
Israeli rights groups on Monday called on the international community to stop Israel from carrying out the plan, saying there were “worrying signs” that Israel was beginning to carry out the plan.
The statement, signed by B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din, and the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, warned that states “have an obligation to prevent the crimes of starvation and forced displacement.”
___ Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip and Magdy from Cairo.
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