Israel expands strikes to northern Lebanon as death toll rises

BEIRUT – Israel expanded airstrikes to the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Saturday, underscoring the scale of Israel’s military campaign as ground troops move through the south and air raids pound towns and cities across the country.

Hamas said that the strike in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, had killed one of its field commanders, Saeed Atallah Ali, alongside his wife and two daughters. The Israeli military confirmed the strike but did not mention any civilian dead. In eastern Lebanon, another strike killed Muhammed Hussein al-Lawis, described by the Israeli army as Hamas’ “executive authority” in Lebanon, while in the capital, Beirut, bombing raids echoed from the southern suburbs as the city braced for another sleepless night.

At least 2,036 people in Lebanon have been killed and 9,535 people wounded since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza last October, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The majority of deaths came in recent weeks, after Israel targeted the Hezbollah militant group’s communication devices, wounding several thousand people, and then killed its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, along with much of his chain of command.

The reach and intensity of Israel’s military operation has shocked a Lebanese population that had long dreaded its arrival. Israel says that its campaign is meant to halt Hezbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel, allowing tens of thousands of displaced people to move back there. Yet the news that airstrikes have reached Tripoli indicates that Israel’s military ambitions in Lebanon perhaps go much further, even as the effort sparks a humanitarian crisis in a country ill-equipped to handle it.

Reporters have limited access to areas most affected by the fighting, and the Israeli military has released few details about how deep the two divisions now deployed in southern Lebanon have advanced. Interviews with local officials and people who have been recently displaced suggest the destruction is widespread; satellite imagery shows that hundreds of buildings have been destroyed.

In a statement Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces said it had discovered a range of weapons caches and tunnel shafts. A video published on the IDF’s Telegram channel showed mostly small arms – including rifles and grenades.

Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging cross-border fire on Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah launched a volley of rockets into Israel one day after Hamas militants breached Gaza’s border wall and attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Hezbollah said it would continue its attacks until a cease-fire is reached in Gaza, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

In Lebanon, Israel’s military operations and displacement orders have displaced 1.2 million people, according to Environment Minister Nasser Yassin, who is coordinating the government’s emergency response. Displacement shelters are at maximum capacity, Lebanese authorities said Friday, and families with nowhere else to go have set up camp on Beirut’s waterfront or out on the beach.

In the parking lot of a popular nightclub that has opened its doors to fleeing families, Mahdi Jabai, 35, said he worried most for his two sons. “They have not seen war, they don’t know war,” he said. “This child wants to live his life,” he said of one of the boys. “He wants to live and to play, why does he have to live under the sun on the street?”

Intense bombing the night before had terrified the family. “We didn’t sleep,” Jabai said.

The United Nations said that it had recorded at least 36 attacks on health-care facilities over the past year, with 28 health-care workers killed in a 24-hour period this week. Lebanon’s civil defense force said Saturday that rescue personnel were unable to reach the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs due to “heavy bombing” there.

“Health workers are paying the heaviest price with their lives. The health system is on the brink of collapsing,” tweeted Imran Riza, the U.N. deputy special coordinator, resident coordinator and humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon.

The U.S. State Department said Saturday that it planned to provide around $157 million in humanitarian assistance to help the displaced. But there were few indications that the Biden administration planned to halt, or even limit, the shipments of American weaponry that has powered Israeli military operations in Lebanon and in Gaza, where health authorities say almost 42,000 people have been killed – most of them women and children.

Most of Gaza’s population has been corralled into an ever-shrinking area of the central Gaza Strip that Israel has technically designated as a safe zone, although strikes continue there. On Saturday, the Israeli army ordered civilians from an area to the north, including Nuseirat and Bureij, to evacuate. “Hamas and the terrorist organizations continue their terrorist activities within your area and accordingly the IDF will act with great force against these elements,” spokesman Avichay Adraee said in a post to X.

Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said that the new warning had sparked panic among a bone-tired population that has spent much of the year trying to keep their families safe and outrun the fighting. “Everyone asking ‘Where are we supposed to go?’” Wateridge tweeted. “Displacement on displacement on displacement.”

On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron said countries should stop arming Israel’s war in Gaza, expressing concern that the civilians of Lebanon could now face a similar fate.

“The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to carry out fighting in Gaza,” Macron said on Radio France. He said France “is not delivering any.” Macron said that terrorism should not be fought by “sacrificing a civilian population,” and that he had expressed those concerns to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As Israel continued its ground invasion of Lebanon, Macron said Saturday that he was worried Lebanon would “become a new Gaza.”

“The Lebanese people cannot, in turn, be sacrificed,” he said.