Israeli airstrikes killed at least six people and wounded several others Wednesday morning in the town of Tayr Debba, near Tyre in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said it carried out the operations in response to what it described as a Hezbollah violation of the ceasefire.
Israeli warplanes and drones carried out eight strikes on Tayr Debba, according to Lebanon’s national news agency. The Lebanese Civil Defense reported that a number of people remained missing under the rubble, adding that warplanes also struck the nearby towns of Al-Mansouri and Majdal Zoun.
The morning strikes followed evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military since Tuesday for residents of several towns in the area, including the Christian quarter of Tyre and surrounding camps and neighborhoods. The death toll from Tuesday’s Israeli strikes on that area rose to 11, according to Sky News Arabia.
Israel also expanded its strikes across southern Lebanon on Wednesday, targeting the towns of Kfarrumman, Nabatieh al-Fawqa, Rihan, Abba, Siddiqin, and Ansariyyeh, as well as the outskirts of Tyre, following evacuation warnings for Ansariyyeh residents, according to Al-Manar.
In the past 24 hours, Lebanon’s General Directorate of Civil Defense said its teams carried out 127 ambulance, rescue, and firefighting missions, including rubble-clearing operations, searches for casualties, and transferring the wounded and the dead.
Hezbollah, for its part, carried out a series of operations over the past 24 hours targeting Israeli forces and vehicles near Beaufort Castle and Yohmur in the Nabatieh area, and fired rockets and drones at Israeli forces near the town of Bayada in southern Lebanon, according to Al Jazeera.
The escalation comes ahead of a new round of negotiations between the two countries in a tripartite meeting with the United States, which is sponsoring the talks, scheduled for June 22, according to a Tuesday statement from the Lebanese Presidency published on X.
Lebanon's overall death toll has risen to 3,666 killed and 11,321 wounded between March 2 and June 9, according to the latest figures from the Lebanese Health Ministry.
The Lebanese and Israeli governments had agreed last week to work toward a US-brokered ceasefire agreement, contingent on a full halt to hostilities by Hezbollah and the withdrawal of all its forces from south of the Litani River; conditions the group had previously rejected, along with direct negotiations with Israel.
On June 2 and 3, high-level trilateral political talks took place, after which Israel and Lebanon agreed to create a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon, “in which the Lebanese Armed Forces will take exclusive control of the territory to the exclusion of all non-state actors,” a US State Department statement said, referring to Hezbollah.
The day after the agreement was announced, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz reaffirmed that the Israeli military would continue its operations in Lebanon and maintain its positions in the south.
