One civilian was killed and ten others were wounded in a series of Israeli strikes on Baalbek city and its surrounding areas in eastern Lebanon on Tuesday, Lebanese military sources told Xinhua.
The military sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the casualties resulted from four Israeli airstrikes targeting a residential building in the Dhour Al-Ayroun neighborhood in the vicinity of Sar’een town, a house in Sar’een, and another house on the outskirts of the village of Al-Nabi Shayth. The strikes destroyed three buildings and damaged 20 homes in total.
The sources added that members of the Civil Defense, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the Islamic Health Authority, equipped with several bulldozers and cranes, have rushed to the scene, working to remove the rubble and transport the injured to hospitals.
Medical sources told Xinhua that the civil defense crew is still working to search for possible casualties potentially under the rubble of the three destroyed buildings.
Military sources confirmed to Xinhua that they detected on Tuesday afternoon the launching of about 30 surface-to-surface missiles from southern Lebanon toward northern Israel, noting some of them were intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said Tuesday that its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah received a Hamas delegation headed by its deputy chief in Gaza, Khalil Al-Hayya, to discuss the latest developments in Gaza and Lebanon.
The meeting is the first between Nasrallah and Al-Hayya since the assassination of the deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, Saleh Al-Arouri, in early January in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh and the second since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Lebanon-Israel border has been witnessing increased tension since Oct. 8, 2023, after Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets toward Israel in support of the Hamas attack on Israel the previous day, prompting Israel to respond by firing heavy artillery toward southeastern Lebanon.
The confrontations between Hezbollah and Israel have killed 358 people on the Lebanese side, including 236 Hezbollah members and 71 civilians, according to Lebanese security sources. ■
