Israeli air raids hitting mostly southern and eastern Lebanon have killed at least 492 people and wounded at least 1,645, according to the country’s health ministry, in the deadliest day of conflict in Lebanon since its 1975-90 civil war.
The ministry said the death toll on Monday included at least 35 children, 58 women and two medics as the bombardments hit homes, medical centres, ambulances and cars of people trying to flee.
Tens of thousands of Lebanese fled the south, and the main highway out of the southern port city of Sidon was jammed with cars heading towards Beirut in the biggest exodus since the 2006 fighting.
The government ordered schools and universities to close across most of the country and began preparing shelters for people displaced from the south.
Some attacks hit residential areas of towns in the south and the Bekaa Valley in the east. One strike hit a wooded area as far away as Byblos in central Lebanon, more than 129km (80 miles) from the border and north of Beirut.
The Israeli military also said it conducted a “targeted strike” in Beirut, without offering immediate details.
Israeli media reported that the target of the strike was senior military commander Ali Karaki, the head of the southern front, but Hezbollah said he was in good health and in a safe location.
The Israeli army said it had struck more than 1,300 sites used by the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah. The increased hostilities raise further fears of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah or even a wider regional conflagration.
Israel’s military warned people in Lebanon to move away from places used by Hezbollah, which launched a barrage of rockets into northern Israel on Sunday.
The warnings ignored the possibility that some residents could live in or near targeted structures without knowing they are at risk.
Many people who received warnings told Al Jazeera that they did not know where to go.
“They [also wondered] how they are supposed to know where Hezbollah has stored its weapons,” Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari said, reporting from Beirut.
“They don’t share this information readily, … so it’s created a lot of confusion and a lot of anger.”
Jabbari said people in Beirut are “anxious about not only what is happening in the south but about how close they are to actually being in a full-out war between Hezbollah and Israel”.
On Monday evening, the Israeli government announced a nationwide state of emergency until September 30.
The Israeli media outlet Haaretz said that under the declaration, the army is granted powers to issue instructions to the Israeli public, allowing it to ban gatherings, limit studies, and issue “additional instructions required to save lives”.
The intensification of the fighting across the shared border, which has seen low-level skirmishes since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October, follows last week’s explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies, which killed dozens of people in Lebanon.
Early on Monday, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said its forces conducted “extensive strikes” against Hezbollah posts after identifying attempts to fire rockets.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday after the strikes that Israel faced “complicated days” and called on Israelis to stay united as the campaign unfolded.
“I promised that we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north. That is exactly what we are doing,” he said in a message issued after a situational assessment at military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
His government recently declared that it was shifting more focus to the fighting with Hezbollah in a bid to allow about 60,000 Israelis who evacuated from border areas to return home.
Asked by a reporter whether the army was planning a ground invasion into Lebanon, Hagari said, “We will do everything necessary to return the residents of the north to their homes safely.”
Lebanese media reported that people across the country, including Beirut in central Lebanon, have been receiving Israeli phone warnings telling them to evacuate.
Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported that “citizens in Beirut and a number of areas are receiving landline telephone warning messages whose source is the Israeli enemy, asking them to quickly evacuate.”
Information Minister Ziad Makary’s office in Beirut said it received a landline call featuring a recorded message that told it to evacuate the building to avoid an air strike.
The NNA labelled the phone warnings “part of the psychological war that the enemy has adopted”.
‘Battle of reckoning’
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern on Monday over the escalating tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, urging for de-escalation and a diplomatic solution.
“The Secretary General is indeed alarmed by the escalating situation along the Blue Line. He’s very concerned about the large number of civilian casualties being reported by the Lebanese authorities, as well as the thousands of displaced persons amid the most intense exchange of fire across the Blue Line since October of last year,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters during a news conference.
White House spokesperson John Kirby said the United States still believes there is room for a “diplomatic solution” while warning Israel there are “better ways” to allow its residents to return to their houses in the north.
Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem told mourners at the funeral of one of the group’s commanders killed last week in Beirut: “We have entered a new phase, the title of which is the Open-Ended Battle of Reckoning.”
On Saturday, Hezbollah launched dozens of rockets at Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in its farthest-reaching attack inside Israel.
Monday’s salvo was among the heaviest cross-border fire exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of the war in Gaza.
The two parties have been exchanging nearly daily fire since October 8 with the Iran-backed group saying it would stop only once a ceasefire is achieved in the Palestinian enclave.
But while those exchanges were largely confined to border areas and were aimed at primarily military targets, they have escalated dramatically this week.
Israel’s shift of focus was initiated in a wave of unprecedented attacks. On Tuesday and Wednesday, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in Beirut, targeting Hezbollah’s rank and file members as well as civilians and sending shockwaves across the country.
At least 37 people were killed and more than 3,000 were wounded in the explosions. These were widely blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.
On Friday, an Israeli strike killed a senior commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit and second-in-command of the group’s armed forces, Ibrahim Aqil.
The strike in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh killed at least 45 people, including 10 civilians.
