JERUSALEM — Dozens of Israeli fighter jets bombed Hezbollah targets in southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, killing hundreds and wounding more than a thousand others, Lebanese officials said, in the deadliest attacks in the country since 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah fought their last all-out war.
As Israeli warplanes raced through Lebanon’s skies, Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia backed by Iran, launched its own barrage at Israel. Air-raid sirens there rang out repeatedly as roughly 250 rockets and other munitions crossed the border, according to the Israeli military. Most of the projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s antimissile defense system, and there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious casualties.
The widespread airstrikes in Lebanon — and warnings by Israel to Lebanese to flee areas where it said Hezbollah was stashing weapons — set off fear and confusion among civilians. Many pulled their children from school and left home. Cars clogged main roads to Beirut, the capital, as people fled cities, towns and villages in southern Lebanon, where many of the heaviest strikes landed, witnesses said.
Lebanon’s health ministry said the bombardment had killed at least 492 people, including at least 24 children, and injured more than 1,600. The ministry, which counts casualties reported to hospitals, did not say how many of the dead were Hezbollah fighters.
The single-day death toll was nearly half the total toll in Lebanon in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, which lasted 34 days.
Israeli leaders said they were intensifying their attacks on Hezbollah to stop it from firing into northern Israel, which the group began doing Oct. 8, a day after its Gaza Strip ally, Hamas, led the deadly cross-border raid on southern Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis to expect “complicated days” ahead and said Israel was determined to “change the balance of security” in the north. “That is exactly what we’re doing,” Netanyahu said.
For nearly a year, the Israeli military has concentrated its firepower on Gaza, seeking to dismantle Hamas and free the remaining hostages seized Oct. 7. But in recent weeks, military leaders have said they were shifting more resources north toward the border with Lebanon. They said they were opening up a new, more intense phase of the fight and were intent on pushing Hezbollah forces deeper into Lebanon.
In the past week alone, clandestine operations widely attributed to Israel blew up Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon, killing 37 people and wounding thousands. Then the Israeli air force killed Ibrahim Aqeel, a senior Hezbollah leader, alongside several other commanders of the group’s elite Radwan unit, in a bombing on a residential building in Beirut.
Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week they would unnerve Hezbollah and persuade it to pull farther from the border, allowing roughly 60,000 Israelis displaced by Hezbollah fire to return home. More than 100,000 Lebanese have also been forced from their homes.
But for now, the opposite has happened: Hezbollah leaders have said they will continue their attacks until Israel ends its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has even dared Israel to invade southern Lebanon, a move that could just as plausibly lead to a protracted stalemate as an Israeli victory.
The Israeli military said Monday that it had dropped more than 1,400 bombs and other munitions on more than 1,300 Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, a major show of force targeting buildings in which it said the group had hidden rockets, missiles, launchers, drones and other military infrastructure.
The strikes were concentrated in southern Lebanon, according to a New York Times analysis of local news reports, although many others hit the northeastern Bekaa Valley and as far north as Hermel, a town near the Syrian border.
The country’s health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said that thousands of Lebanese families had been displaced by the Israeli offensive and that some of the strikes had hit medical centers, ambulances and fire trucks, as well as people who were attempting to drive to safety.
Monday evening, the Israeli military carried out an airstrike in Beirut that targeted Ali Karaki, a member of Hezbollah’s top leadership, according to two current Israeli officials and one former Israeli official with knowledge of the operation. Hezbollah said in a statement that Karaki had survived the attack.
On Monday, Netanyahu issued a statement in English to the Lebanese people, saying that “Israel’s war is not with you; it’s with Hezbollah.” He warned Lebanese citizens “to get out of harm’s way” until Israel’s operation was finished.
The Israeli military’s Arabic-language spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, told residents of the Bekaa Valley that if they were close to or inside Hezbollah sites, they had until about 5 p.m. to move “no less than 1,000 meters” outside their village or head to the nearest “central school.” They should not return until further notice, he said on social media.
Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, said Monday that the United States was sending a “a small number of additional U.S. military personnel” to the Middle East in light of what he called “increased tensions” in the region. The troops will number in the dozens, one official said, and will help protect the thousands of Americans stationed there.
“We continue to consult closely with Israel and others in the region to prevent this from becoming a wider regional war,” Ryder told reporters. The U.S. wants “to see temperatures be reduced and escalation be reduced,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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