Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire as residents in Lebanon look for safety

Updated September 24, 2024 at 07:39 AM ET

Israeli forces and Hezbollah have continued to trade cross-border missiles through the night and into Tuesday morning, following the deadliest day of airstrikes in the country for almost two decades.

Overnight, the Israeli military said that it initiated airstrikes alongside tank and artillery fire on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah announced early Tuesday it had fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel, aimed at several military installations, an airbase and a munitions factory.

Israeli authorities say a regional hospital was damaged as sirens sounded throughout large swathes of northern Israel. The Israeli missile interception batteries forced some of the rockets down, the Israeli military said, but several buildings were damaged and firefighting crews were working to extinguish blazes that resulted.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Tuesday that 558 people have been killed since Israel launched its strikes on Monday. Among them, according to Health Minister Firass Abiad, 50 victims were children and 94 were women. Abiad said 1,835 people have been injured, and that medical staff are working “above and beyond to look after all patients.”

Elsewhere, Israeli strikes in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis early Tuesday killed at least seven, Palestinian officials said.

And in an interview with CNN, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that the Israeli strikes risk pushing the region into wider conflict. “We must not allow for Lebanon to become another Gaza at the hands of Israel,” Pezeshkian said in the CNN report.

On Monday, Hezbollah fired roughly 100 missiles, some of them deep into Israel and around the northern city of Haifa, were largely intercepted and Israeli emergency services only reported a handful of injuries.

The vast majority of the people killed on Monday were in the south of Lebanon, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, in a region where the militant group Hezbollah has initiated many of its cross-border attacks on targets inside Israel since October 7th.

Thousands fled their homes and headed northwards away villages, towns and cities in that border region. On a four-lane highway with two lanes of traffic usually passing in both directions, all four lanes were filled with escaping cars and buses, crammed with passengers. Children sat atop some vehicles or were crammed into the back of vegetable trucks, with some men sitting in the trunk of a car as Lebanese soldiers waved them through.

Residents from southern Lebanon described being told to leave their homes in anonymous phone calls. “Please leave all your work and go outside,” Bilal Hemadi said he was told by someone speaking in broken Arabic on an Israeli phone number that called his home’s landline number. The businessman, who lives in a border village called Nabatieh, said he responded, “‘OK, thank you,'” and with his wife and three children he soon headed north to Beirut, where he will shelter with friends.

With little notice, many of the thousands fleeing had little time to pack belongings, and not all were sure in conversations where they would go.

One of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders told people mourning at a funeral in Beirut this past weekend that this conflict now represented an open-ended war, while the Israeli military has said it will not rule out a ground invasion across the border into Lebanon’s territory.

This latest escalation in cross border violence follows the thousands of unexpected pager and walkie-talkie explosions that left members and allies of Hezbollah dead or severely wounded. Civilians, including children, were also injured or killed during those explosions across Lebanon, and soon after an airstrike Friday in the Lebanese capital killed dozens of other civilians, including children, as well as Hezbollah fighters and the senior commander of the group that the Israeli military said it had targeted.

In a video released Monday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned people in Lebanon that Hezbollah – which is considered a terrorist organization in several nations, including the United States – was endangering them and they should leave areas close to the border in the country’s south and east.

Copyright 2024 NPR