The Dahiya, an area outside Beirut, after an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.
Credit...Hussein Malla/Associated Press

Israeli Strike Hits Lebanese Municipal Building, Killing Mayor

The strike, in the south of Lebanon, killed at least 16 people, Lebanese officials said. Israel, which also struck near Beirut, said it was targeting Hezbollah militants.

by · NY Times

The Israeli military on Wednesday bombed the densely populated southern outskirts of Beirut for the first time in days and also struck a southern Lebanese city where local officials were meeting, killing at least 16 people, including the mayor, according to Lebanese officials.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, said in a statement that the attack on the southern city of Nabatieh had “intentionally targeted” a local government meeting.

Nabatieh’s mayor, Ahmad Kahil, and several members of a local relief team that the United Nations had worked with for more than a year were killed, and at least 52 people were wounded, according to U.N. and Lebanese officials. The strikes hit the city’s municipal building, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

“Health care facilities, mosques, historical markets, residential complexes and now government buildings are being reduced to rubble,” the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, Imran Riza, said in a statement.

The Israeli military said it had struck “dozens of Hezbollah terrorist targets” in the area, including command centers and weapons storage facilities “embedded by Hezbollah adjacent to civilian infrastructure.”

Hezbollah exercises de facto control over much of southern Lebanon, including Nabatieh, though the group does not enjoy unanimous public support. Many in Nabatieh, once home to tens of thousands of people, have fled in recent weeks under evacuation orders by the Israeli military.

In another town in southern Lebanon, Qana, an overnight strike killed at least three people and wounded 50 others, according to the Lebanese health ministry. The Israeli military said it had killed a local Hezbollah commander in Qana, along with several other militants. The town was also the site of an Israeli strike on a U.N. compound in 1996 that killed at least 100 displaced civilians.

Israel, which has invaded southern Lebanon and carried out heavy airstrikes there and in other parts of the country, has vowed to stop Hezbollah from launching rockets and missiles into its territory. The armed group, which is backed by Iran, began those cross-border strikes more than a year ago, a day after its ally Hamas led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. The strikes have displaced more than 60,000 people in northern Israel.

In Lebanon, the Israeli onslaught has displaced about a million people, with more than a quarter of the country subjected to Israeli evacuation orders, according to U.N. officials. The displaced include 400,000 children, nearly half of whom have moved into makeshift shelters, usually in public schools that lack sufficient bathrooms, showers and other necessities, Ted Chaiban, a top official at the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, said on Wednesday.

Mr. Chaiban described a “humanitarian catastrophe unfolding” with “deeply concerning echoes” of the crisis in the Gaza Strip.

“This has taken a huge toll on children in particular, who now grapple with nightmares of bombardments, loss of loved ones and the erasure of their homes and schools,” he told reporters.

The strikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut on Wednesday came just after 7 a.m. Photos of the scene showed piles of concrete and mangled metal next to large apartment buildings.

An hour beforehand, the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning for a building in the area. A map that accompanied the warning, which was posted on social media just after 6 a.m., indicated that the building was across the street from one school and less than 200 meters from another.

Amnesty International, the human rights group, said this week that such warnings were inadequate because they were often issued when people were still asleep and gave little time for people to take action.

The blasts rocked residents after nearly a week without any such attacks in or around Beirut, the Lebanese capital. Hours later, Israeli fighter jets flew overhead, setting off sonic booms that sent screaming schoolchildren running for cover.

The strikes hit a day after Mr. Mikati said that his government had received “a sort of guarantee” from the Biden administration that Israel would scale back its attacks on Beirut. A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said on Tuesday the United States had conveyed its concerns to Israel about “the scope and nature” of the bombing in Beirut.

On Wednesday, Mr. Miller said that Israel still had the right to strike Hezbollah targets.

“We understand that Hezbollah does operate at times from underneath civilian homes, inside civilian homes,” he said. “We’ve seen footage that has emerged over the course of the past two weeks of rockets and other military weapons held in civilian homes. So Israel does have a right to go after those legitimate targets, but they need to do so in a way that protects civilian infrastructure, protects civilians.”

The strikes are not the only threat to civilians in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Wednesday that it had detected a case of cholera in the northeast of the country, the first known case of the waterborne disease this year. The World Health Organization warned last week of disease outbreaks as Lebanese civilians crowd into shelters, and hospitals are forced to close amid the Israeli offensive.

On Wednesday, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, reported that it had once again come under fire from Israeli forces.

An Israeli tank fired at a watchtower near the southern town of Kafr Kila, damaging it and destroying two cameras, the U.N. mission said. The peacekeepers have come under Israeli fire several times over the past week, and at least four have been injured, drawing international condemnation.

“Yet again we see direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position,” the U.N. organization said in a statement.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the peacekeeping force was “not a target” and that it was examining the incident. It said that for years, Hezbollah has attacked Israel and its soldiers from sites built “within and adjacent” to UNIFIL posts.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Levenson, Victoria Kim, Ephrat Livni, Johnatan Reiss, Farnaz Fassihi and Gabby Sobelman.

Our Coverage of the Middle East Crisis