More than 20 people have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a Christian town in northern Lebanon, prompting Hezbollah to fire rockets at Tel Aviv, as Israel’s multifront war continues to escalate.
It was also a particularly bloody 24 hours in the Gaza Strip. Four people were killed in an Israeli bombing of a hospital courtyard in central Gaza, another strike on a nearby school used as a shelter killed at least 20 people, and a drone strike killed five children playing on the street in al-Shati camp in Gaza City, according to local health authorities.
Rights groups say Israel is seeking to forcibly expel the remaining population of northern Gaza in a ferocious renewed campaign on the besieged Palestinian territory. The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports of civilian casualties in the three incidents on Sunday and Monday.
The bombing in Lebanon on Monday afternoon that struck Aitou, a Maronite village near the northern city of Tripoli, hit a small apartment building, killing 21 people according to the Lebanese Red Cross.
Footage from the scene broadcast by Lebanese TV channels showed a heavily damaged building, destroyed cars, and dead and injured people lying on the street as people dug through the rubble.
Aitou is far from Hezbollah’s power centres in Beirut and the south and east of the country. The village’s mayor, Joseph Trad, told Reuters the building had been rented to families displaced by the war.
The strike was one of several over the past two weeks targeting areas thought to be “safe”, including the bombing of a displacement centre in the southern town of Wardaniyeh last week. Israel is also facing international criticism for at least three violations that have injured five members of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
On Monday, Italy, the UK, France and Germany released a joint statement condemning Israel for repeatedly attacking UN peacekeepers. “These attacks must stop immediately,” they said, adding deliberate attacks were against international law.
The UN security council expressed strong concern about the attacks. In a statement adopted by consensus, the 15-member council urged all parties – without naming them – to respect the safety and security of the personnel and premises of the UN peacekeeping mission, known as Unifil. “UN peacekeepers and UN premises must never be the target of an attack,” said the council, reiterating its support for Unifil and the operation’s importance for regional stability.
The security council also called for the full implementation of its resolution 1701, which was adopted in 2006 with the aim of keeping peace on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday evening that accusations Israeli troops had deliberately harmed peacekeepers were “completely false”, as he repeated a call for them to withdraw from combat zones close to the border.
He said Hezbollah used Unifil positions as cover for attacks that have killed Israelis, including on Sunday, when a drone attack on a military base killed four soldiers.
“Israel has every right to defend itself against Hezbollah and will continue to do so,” Netanyahu said, adding that he regretted any harm to Unifil personnel but the best way to ensure their safety was “to heed Israel’s request and to temporarily get out of harm’s way”.
The UN’s peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, said later that peacekeepers would stay in all positions in Lebanon.
“The decision was made that Unifil would currently stay in all its positions in spite of the calls that were made by the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] to vacate the positions that are in the vicinity of the blue line,” he said.
Five peacekeepers have been wounded in attacks that struck their positions since Israel began a ground campaign against the Hezbollah militant group, with most blamed on Israeli forces. The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said: “Their work is very important. It’s completely unacceptable attacking United Nations troops.”
There was no immediate comment from the IDF or Hezbollah on the Aitou strike or its target. The IDF said it had targeted the head of the powerful Lebanese militia’s anti-tank unit, Muhammad Kamel Naim, in a strike on Monday in the southern city of Nabatieh.
On Monday evening, Hezbollah appeared to respond to the Aitou attack by firing a salvo of at least three rockets at Israel’s commercial and diplomatic centre, Tel Aviv. Air raid sirens were triggered across vast swathes of central and northern Israel, but the attack was intercepted by Israel’s air defence systems.
On Sunday Hezbollah inflicted the deadliest attack so far on Israel during the two-week-old war, a drone strike on a military base near Binyamina that killed four soldiers and severely wounded another seven. Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, vowed “a forceful response” to the attack during a phone call with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on Monday.
In Gaza, four people were killed in an Israeli strike on the courtyard of al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah in the centre of the territory early on Monday. The bombing triggered a large fire, leaving 25 people with severe burns.
The hospital was already struggling to cope with treating the wounded from a strike on Sunday night on a school turned shelter in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp that killed at least 20 people. Five children in al-Shati camp in Gaza City were also killed on Sunday in a drone strike, Gaza’s civil defence agency said.
Later on Monday, the IDF said a soldier had been killed in combat in southern Gaza.
The renewed aerial attacks come amid Israel’s latest campaign in Jabaliya, a district of Gaza City, now in its second week. An estimated 400,000 people are trapped by the fighting and Israel has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month, leading the UN World Food Programme to once again raise the alarm of imminent famine.
The entirety of northern Gaza is now under Israeli evacuation orders. Among those who have remained in the north are disabled or elderly people and their families, who say it is too dangerous and difficult to move.
Israel has not allowed anyone from above what is now known as the Netzarim corridor bisecting the strip to return home; those clinging on in the north fear that if they leave, they will face the same fate.
On Monday, the Israeli-Palestinian rights groups B’Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights called on the international community to prevent Israel from carrying out the “generals’ plan”, described as a “starve or surrender” strategy that could amount to war crimes.
In a statement, the rights groups said there were “alarming signs” that Israel was beginning to implement the plan in Jabaliya, and warned that states “have an obligation to prevent the crimes of starvation and forcible transfer”.
The IDF says it has not received such orders. However, citing “senior defence officials”, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Sunday that the Israeli government had given up on stalled ceasefire and hostage release talks in the year-old war, and the political leadership was instead “pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza”.
