ISRAELI jets have continued attacking targets across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut, for a seventh day, with Lebanese officials saying the nonstop bombardment had left up to a million people in the streets.
As fears of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah grow, Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Sunday the intense Israeli attacks had possibly caused the “worst displacement crisis” in the country’s history.
Earlier, the Israeli military said its fighter jets had struck Hezbollah targets, including rocket launchers and weapons storage facilities, and carried out dozens of air raids across Lebanon.
At least 11 people were killed in an air raid on a house in the town of Ain in the Bekaa Valley in the northeast, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Marjeyoun in southern Lebanon, said a civil defence centre was hit in a small town just outside the Tyre governorate, killing four people and injuring several others.
Overall, Lebanon’s Health Ministry says more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks.
Also on Sunday, the Israeli military announced the killing of senior Hezbollah official Nabil Kaouk, a day after the group confirmed the killing of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an attack on Friday on a densely populated civilian area of southern Beirut. Hezbollah also confirmed Kaouk’s killing on Sunday.
Mikati said the only option to end the conflict was a diplomatic solution. “There’s no choice for us but diplomacy.”
The killing of several top Hezbollah commanders in recent weeks has dealt a huge blow to the group engaged in cross-border fighting with Israel since last October. The Iran-backed group has set a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip as a condition to stop the attacks it began in solidarity with Palestinians in the besieged and bombarded territory, where nearly a year of Israeli attacks has killed more than 41,500 people.
On Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the killing of Revolutionary Guards Deputy Commander Abbas Nilforoushan alongside the Hezbollah chief “will not go unanswered.”
“This horrible crime of the aggressor Zionist regime will not go unanswered, and the diplomatic apparatus will also use all its political, diplomatic, legal and international capacities to pursue the criminals and their supporters,” he said, according to a foreign ministry statement.
