The mayor of one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit the city’s municipal headquarters during a meeting to coordinate aid deliveries to residents and those displaced by war.
The strike, one of a series on Nabatieh on Wednesday morning, killed 16 people and wounded 52, the Lebanese health ministry said. Howaida Turk, the governor of Nabatieh province, said members of the provincial capital’s crisis committee were meeting at the time.
It was the most significant Israeli hit yet on a Lebanese state institution since fighting between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah broke out a year ago, and followed a week of intensifying aerial bombardment across Lebanon.
Efforts to rescue people stuck under the rubble stretched into the afternoon.
A government civil defence centre in Nabatieh was also hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing 50-year-old Naji Fahs, who had worked as a member of the emergency response force since 2002. Later in the afternoon, the Lebanese Red Cross said two of its paramedics were lightly injured after Israel struck a site in Joya, south Lebanon, where first responders were trying to rescue people injured in a previous attack.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the attack, saying Israel had intentionally targeted municipal employees while they were meeting to discuss humanitarian aid efforts.
Late on Wednesday, UN peacekeepers again accused Israeli forces of firing on their position in a “direct and apparently deliberate” attack.
Peacekeepers in the southern village of Kfar Kila saw an Israeli army tank “firing at their watchtower”, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said.
Israel has faced international criticism for a series of incidents in which Unifil positions have been targeted, injuring at least five members of the UN force.
The UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said suffering in Lebanon had reached unprecedented levels and that it was imperative to “protect civilians at all times”.
Israel said on Wednesday that it had hit dozens of Hezbollah targets in the Nabatieh area and that its navy had also hit Hezbollah “launchers, military positions and weapons caches” in south-west Lebanon.
On 3 October, Israel ordered people to leave the city, saying it would soon attack Hezbollah installations in Nabatieh. Some residents and displaced people remained there.
Israel has stepped up its airstrikes on Nabatieh over the past week, levelling swathes of the city. An Ottoman-era market that dated back to 1910 was destroyed in the bombings on Sunday.
Turk said: “It’s terrible destruction, the weapons that are being used are so destructive. They are damaging not only the targeted areas but also the surroundings.”
Israel also carried out strikes on Dahiyeh in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Wednesday morning after several days of calm around the capital city. Israel last struck Beirut last Thursday, when it levelled a block of flats and killed 22 people in the deadliest strike on the capital city since 2006.
The strikes defied what Mikati had told Al Jazeera just a day earlier were assurances given by the US that Israel would reduce its attacks on Beirut.
Meanwhile, the UN’s human rights office on Wednesday called for an investigation into an Israeli airstrike that killed 24 people on Monday in the Christian-majority village of Aitou, in northern Lebanon. The strike hit a residential block rented out to families displaced from fighting in Lebanon’s south. All of those killed were displaced people.
The UN human rights spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said the UN had “real concerns with respect to [international humanitarian law]” surrounding the strike.
Raymond Alwan, an official in the Aitou municipality, said the strike had left people there “terrified” and that those who had hosted displaced people feared their homes would be struck next. Alwan said the municipality was ensuring that the rights of displaced people would still be respected, “under the condition that they do not bring us any problems”.
Hezbollah has stepped up the frequency of its attacks in Israel in recent days, despite the loss of most of its senior military and political leadership. A drone attack on a military base in northern Israel on Sunday killed four soldiers and wounded 54.
Its deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, said on Tuesday that the group had adjusted its tactics to cause renewed damage to Israel.
More than 2,350 people have been killed and 10,906 wounded in Lebanon since Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas’s attack a day earlier, starting a year of fighting. Most of the casualties are from the last month of fighting.
