Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 15 people were killed Saturday in Israeli attacks on three villages outside traditional Hezbollah strongholds, as state media reported more attacks elsewhere.
“Nine people were killed and 15 wounded in an Israeli enemy attack on Maysara, a Shia Muslim-majority village in the mostly Christian mountainous region north of Beirut,” the ministry said in a statement.
An AFP correspondent in Maysara saw excavators trying to remove pieces of a destroyed building. Emergency personnel, including one using a manual sledgehammer, tried to break up a huge slab of concrete.
Separately, the ministry said four people were killed and 18 others were wounded in an “Israeli enemy attack” on Barza in the Shouf district, south of the capital.
The ministry reported two dead, four wounded and “dismembered body parts” in an Israeli attack on Der Billah, about 15 kilometers (nine miles) from the city of Batroun on Lebanon’s northern coast.
The statement said DNA testing is being conducted to determine the identity of the remains.
The official National News Agency (NNA) said the “Israeli attack” targeted a house in Der Billah, where families from south Lebanon had taken refuge.
Another AFP correspondent in Der Billah saw a mattress, pillows, bed covers, a laundry basket and clothes amid the debris as people sifted through debris by hand and smoke billowed from the smoldering pile.
In eastern Lebanon, the management of Tal Chiha hospital said in a statement that the facility had suffered “light material damage” due to “attacks targeting the vicinity” of the predominantly Christian town of Zahle.
It said no patients or staff were injured and the hospital is still functioning.
Since September 23, Israel has been heavily bombarding south and eastern Lebanon as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut, saying it was targeting Hezbollah sites.
The mountainous region near Maysara as well as Barja, Der Billah and Zahle are not areas generally considered Hezbollah strongholds.
‘huge damage’
Later on Saturday, the NNA said that “Israeli warplanes … targeted a market center in Nabatiyeh, a major town in southern Lebanon, about 12 kilometers from the border with Israel”.
The Health Ministry reported eight people injured in the “provisional death toll” from that attack, adding that rescue workers were still clearing debris.
Israel’s military last week told residents to evacuate the city, which is home to public institutions, hospitals and a branch of the Lebanese University.
The ministry also said two people were wounded in an “Israeli enemy attack on a civil protection center” of the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee in the village of Aitet in southern Lebanon.
And in the eastern Bekaa Valley, the NNA also reported “several attacks by enemy aircraft”.
The Health Ministry said Tal Chiha hospital and two others in the Bekaa Valley suffered “material damage” in the attacks. The NNA reported “massive damage to homes and property and institutions” and a university in nearby Riyak.
Nearly a year of cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah escalated into a full-scale war on September 23.
The health ministry said on Saturday that 26 people had been killed the previous day, taking the death toll in the violence to 2,255 in a year.
More than half of them have been since September 23, according to an AFP tally.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
