Israel’s strikes in Lebanon kill more than 180 people, Lebanese officials say

BEIRUT — Fighting has escalated at the Israeli-Lebanese border, as Israeli strikes killed more than 180 people largely in southern Lebanon on Monday, according to Lebanese health authorities, in one of the deadliest days of nearly a year of conflict in the region.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says children, women and health care workers were among those killed in Israeli cross-border attacks in southern Lebanon.

Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been trading large numbers of attacks across the border since the war in Gaza began in October last year. Hezbollah’s leadership says it is acting out of solidarity with Palestinians and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

The Israeli military says it is fighting Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, to prevent an assault in northern Israel similar to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel. Israel says it wants degrade Hezbollah’s rocket-launching capabilities, push Hezbollah fighters away from the border and allow Israeli families who evacuated the northern region to return home, as NPR’s Daniel Estrin reported on Morning Edition.

The Israeli military says its forces struck more than 300 targets, many of which it described as Hezbollah weapons storage depots. Strikes damaged several buildings inside populated areas in Lebanon’s south as well as farther east in the country’s Bekaa Valley, but at least one landed some 80 miles north of the border near the city of Byblos, according to Lebanon’s state-run broadcaster.

Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel in recent days, following the explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies last week that killed dozens of people and injured thousands more mainly in Lebanon. Israel has not publicly acknowledged a role in the blasts. But a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told NPR that Israel notified Washington it carried out last Tuesday’s attacks in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s leadership said in a statement Monday it was targeting dozens of rockets at an Israeli military post in northern Israel. Residents in the city of Nazareth told NPR it was a “scary night” into early Monday morning, with “rockets and interceptions over us all night.”

Israeli authorities acknowledge there have been repeated air raid sirens in the country’s north, indicating incoming rocket fire from Lebanon.

On Friday, an airstrike over the Lebanese capital city, Beirut, killed at least 50 Hezbollah fighters and civilians, including children. Israel’s military said that strike had targeted a senior Hezbollah commander.

Across villages and towns in southern Lebanon, residents have been departing for safer regions away from the border. Several months ago, Israeli military officials ordered residents living in communities on the Israeli side of that border to also evacuate as skirmishes and tit-for-tat missile barrages intensified.

The Israeli military spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, warned people living in southern and eastern Lebanon to leave their homes as the air campaign against Hezbollah’s fighters and positions increases to widen.

Residents in southern regions received messages in Arabic instructing them to move away from known weapons storage sites controlled by Hezbollah, according to local Lebanese media, prompting a large migration of people inside Lebanon.

Cars filled the main road north from the southern city of Sidon, up the coastline toward Beirut, although some Israeli airstrikes have repeatedly landed dozens of miles inside Lebanese territory.

Willem Marx wrote from London and Jane Arraf reported from Beirut. Daniel Estrin contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.