ISRAELI strikes have carried out a wave of airstrikes on the southern city of Nabatiyeh, killing at least five people.
Huwaida Turk, the governor of Nabatiyeh province, told the Associated Press that Mayor Ahmad Kahil was among those killed.
Israel said it was targeting Hezbollah militant sites embedded among civilians.
The strikes on southern Beirut were the first in six days, and came after Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the US had given him assurances that Israel would curb its strikes on the capital.
There was no immediate word on casualties.
Israel also killed at least 15 people in the southern Lebanese town of Qana, which has long been associated with civilian deaths after Israeli strikes during previous conflicts with Hezbollah.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the strikes in Qana late on Tuesday.
Lebanon’s Civil Defence said 15 bodies had been recovered from the rubble of a building and that rescue efforts were still underway.
In 1996, Israeli artillery shelling on a United Nations compound housing hundreds of displaced people in Qana killed at least 100 civilians and wounded scores more, including four UN peacekeepers.
During the 2006 war, an Israeli strike on a residential building killed nearly three dozen people, a third of them children.
Israel said at the time that it struck a Hezbollah rocket launcher behind the building.
Hezbollah has a strong presence in southern Beirut, known as the Dahiyeh, which is also a residential and commercial area home to large numbers of civilians and people unaffiliated with the militant group.
The Israeli military said it targeted an arms warehouse under a residential building, without providing evidence.
It posted an evacuation warning on the X, formerly Twitter, platform ahead of the strike, saying it was targeting a building in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood.
An Associated Press photographer saw three airstrikes in the area, the first coming less than an hour after the notice.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on October 8 in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, following the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
A year of low-level fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border escalated into all-out war last month, and has displaced some 1.2 million people in Lebanon.
Some 2300 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since last October, more than three-quarters of them in the past month, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
Hezbollah’s rocket attacks, which have extended their range and grown more intense over the past month, have driven around 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the north.
The attacks have killed nearly 60 people in Israel, around half of them soldiers.
Hezbollah has said it will keep up its attacks until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, but that appears increasingly remote after months of negotiations brokered by the US, Egypt and Qatar sputtered to a halt.
