9 killed in Israeli airstrikes on southern, eastern Lebanon
ANKARA
At least nine people were killed on Friday in Israeli airstrikes targeting towns in southern and eastern Lebanon.
The Lebanese official news agency reported that four Lebanese people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the southern town of Jebchit in the Nabatieh region.
At least five people were killed and two others wounded in an Israeli airstrike targeting a house in the eastern Baalbek-Hermel region, the agency added.
Separately, Lebanese civil defense teams on Friday recovered a body from the rubble in the town of Rayak, in the eastern Bekaa region following an Israeli airstrike on Thursday.
According to a statement from the General Directorate of Civil Defense, teams have been conducting search and rescue operations from Thursday evening through Friday morning.
Besides southern and eastern Lebanon, Israel has also been intensifying its air raids on the capital Beirut.
On Friday morning, Israeli warplanes struck the town of Zrariyeh in Sidon district and also bombed a house in the village of Tair Harfa, south of Tyre, according to the agency.
This comes a day after Israeli fighter jets carried out two strikes on Beirut, killing 22 people and wounding 117, according to preliminary figures from the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Israel has mounted massive airstrikes across Lebanon against what it claims are Hezbollah targets since Sept. 23, killing at least 1,351 people, injuring over 3,800 others, and displacing more than 1.2 million people.
The aerial campaign is an escalation from a year of cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of its offensive on the Gaza Strip, in which Israel has killed over 42,100 people, most of them women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.
Despite international warnings that the Mideast was on the brink of a regional war amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, it expanded the conflict on Oct. 1 by launching a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.
*Writing by Ikram Kouachi
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