Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon take heavy toll on civilians
“The airstrikes are reviving criticism of Israel over its apparent tolerance for high civilian casualties in pursuit of military goals, rights groups say.
SIDON, Lebanon — Zahra Assi sat in her hospital bed last week, wounded in both legs by an Israeli airstrike, struggling with pain but spared by her family, momentarily, from worse: the 7-year old had not been told that the strike had killed her mother, a brother and four other members of her family, one of her surviving brothers said.
As Israel expands a ferocious air campaign in Lebanon that it says targets Hezbollah with precision, the civilian toll is soaring — reviving critical questions about the consideration Israel gives to noncombatants when it carries out the strikes.
The bombing that injured Zahra targeted a residential building in the southern town of Ain Aldelb, where she was staying with her family and dozens of other civilians. Multiple Israeli munitions struck the building Sept. 29, causing it to collapse, survivors said.
At least 45 people were killed, making it one of the deadliest single attacks of the war, health officials said. Days before, another Israeli bombing on a building in the Bekaa Valley killed 15 people, all but one from the same extended family, relatives said.
In response to questions about the strike in Ain Aldelb, about three miles east of Sidon, the Israeli military said it had “eliminated the commander of Hezbollah’s Sidon compound along with several other operatives” after “the execution of evacuation procedures.” It did not name the commander, say how many other operatives were killed or disclose how people were warned to evacuate.
The military did not respond to questions on the Bekaa Valley attack.
As in Gaza — where Israel’s military offensive against Hamas has killed tens of thousands of people over the last year, many of them women and children — rights groups say the scale and intensity of the strikes in Lebanon mean large numbers of civilians are likely to be killed here, too.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled as much in a recorded video message that he released Tuesday, when he warned Lebanon against falling “into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.”
The strikes in Gaza and now in Lebanon “raise serious concerns about the tolerance for civilian casualties,” said Richard Weir, a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who noted that the group has previously documented in Gaza “apparent war crimes by Israeli forces, including airstrikes that have caused massive casualties.”
While Weir said the Israeli military has demonstrated it can be “extremely precise in terms of the damage caused” by its airpower — taking out single cars or individual floors of apartment buildings in targeted strikes on militant leaders — other attacks have been “extremely destructive,” he said. “In some cases, it’s difficult to identify what the target of an individual strike has been — or how they assess the military advantage against expected civilian harm.”
In the three weeks since Israel began its military escalation with attacks on pagers used by Hezbollah, more than 1,500 people have been killed, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians but says at least 333 women and children were among the dead between Sept. 16 and Oct.3.
On Sept. 23 alone, the first day of stepped-up bombing, when Israel carried out more than 1,300 strikes, some 569 people were killed, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. “The vast majority of those who fell were unarmed people who were in their homes,” he said a day later.
Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said during a visit to Beirut on Sunday that there had been “many instances of violations of international humanitarian law in the way the airstrikes are conducted that have destroyed or damaged civilian infrastructure” or killed civilians.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in support of its ally Hamas, setting off a low-level conflict that displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border. From the beginning of the conflict through Sept. 21, Hezbollah conducted at least 1,758 air or drone attacks against Israel, according to data compiled by the ACLED, an organization that collects data on conflicts. In the same period, Israel carried nearly 9,000 airstrikes, the group said.
Twenty-eight civilians in Israel have been killed by Hezbollah attacks, the Israeli military said Thursday.
Israel has characterized its ground invasion of southern Lebanon as “limited” and “localized” — aimed at pushing Hezbollah fighters away from the border and returning displaced Israelis to their homes in the north — but its aerial campaign is only growing.
Israeli strikes have devastated large swaths of the country’s south, thud daily into Beirut’s southern suburbs and have started to creep toward central areas in the capital and new areas in Lebanon’s north. On Monday, Israel unleashed a barrage of dozens of strikes, on towns around the southern city of Tyre.
Adding to the public anxiety are Israeli warnings to avoid Hezbollah “infrastructure” — orders seen as both untenable and dangerously vague. Supporters of the militant group, which is also the country’s most powerful political party, are spread across Lebanon. So are the facilities used in its expansive social services network, including hospitals and schools.
Evacuation orders have been issued by Israel for villages across southern Lebanon, including warnings to avoid driving cars in the region — one of the few means of escape for most people. Other recent warnings to civilians, to avoid buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs, have been posted on social media by an Israel Defense Forces spokesman in the middle of the night.
The strikes have battered Shiite Muslim-majority towns in the increasingly depopulated south, including those where residents said people were largely supportive of Hezbollah but not involved in its operations. And neighboring Christian communities or towns with diverse populations have not been spared.
Witnesses and survivors of the strike in Ain Aldelb said all they knew for sure about the attack was that the building was filled with civilians.
Hisham al-Baba, 59, lives in Berlin and was visiting his 40-year-old sister, Donize. He was in the bathroom at the time of the strike and somehow that saved him, he said from his hospital bed at the Labib Medical Center in the city of Sidon. He was stuck under the rubble for nine hours before being rescued, he said.
Donize; her husband, Moyheldin el-Rawas, 50; and their children Ali, 16, and Nermine, 21, were killed in the strike. Nermine was engaged to be married. Moyheldin was found hugging his children, Baba said.
“We lost. A big loss,” he said. “Catastrophe.”
Downstairs in the same hospital, Zahra’s older brother, Ali Assi, 18, said his family was among the displaced people sheltering in the same building. They had relocated from their home near the southern city of Tyre because of heavy bombing, he said, including an airstrike in front of their home. Zahra’s left thigh had what the doctors called a severe crushing wound that had exposed the bone, and lacerations on her right leg.
One of Ali’s fingers, struck by shrapnel, had to be partially amputated. He was looking after his sister in the hospital while their father, who also survived, had gone back to their village — to bury his wife and the rest of the family.
The attack also killed all nine members of a family that had just fled from the village of Aitaroun, said Osama Saad, a parliament member from Sidon. Others in the building had been displaced from similarly small communities along the border: “So they came to this building fleeing from their towns, they came to their relatives who live in this building,” Saad said.
“The Israeli army usually says they hit a place because of this and that, but this time they did not say anything,” he added, referring to the Israeli military’s public silence for more than a week about the target of the strike. “They killed all these people, but they didn’t say why they hit this place. This is a war crime.”
In the bed next to Zahra, also watching cartoons, was Ziyad Kharaiss, 10, the survivor of a different strike Sunday on his family’s home in the southern town of Khiam. His face was blistered and bruised with what the doctors called “head and ear trauma.”
Among his family, he had the sharpest recollection of what had befallen them — recalling the day and the time the strike occurred, as his mother sometimes sobbed and struggled for words. A Syrian couple and another man were killed in the strike.
The neighborhood was “civilian,” said Rabiah Kharaiss, Ziyad’s father. “We were shocked. Shocked.”
Another son, Ali, 24, was upstairs in the intensive care unit, healing from injuries including the loss of his right eye. Ali and his father were mechanics, the father said. “We are 100 percent defenseless people. We are not affiliated with anyone,” he said.
Another strike, days earlier in the Bekaa Valley, killed 15 people, including extended members of the Shuaib family. The attack sent cars flying and destroyed the building where the family lived in separate apartments, as well as a neighboring house, relatives said.
One relative said most of the adults who were killed worked as teachers, including one who worked in a private school network run by Hezbollah.
The dead included Ali Shuaib, 16, who left behind a bereft principal at his school in the nearby town of Zahleh, two grieving cousins next door and half a dozen chickens he had been raising. They wandered around the rubble after he was gone.
Ali played football and basketball, and “loved to go hiking,” said one of the cousins, a 16-year old also named Ali, as he stood with his brother looking down on the massive heap of concrete and cushions and metal and books.
“It feels unreal,” said Rakan Shuaib, another relative and retired Lebanese army soldier who lived next door. “The town here was supposed to be safe, so a lot of people are coming over to ask us for help finding them a shelter or place to stay.” The bombing blew out walls in his building too. He remained in the house, “because there is no other choice.”
The vast majority of the strikes, he contended, were on people who are “not related to the environment of Hezbollah.” The bombing he said, was “barbaric.”
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