Screenshot taken from a video circulating on social media of the building collapsing following an Israeli airstrike.
SOUR — Over 50 people were killed on Sunday in an Israeli strike on building where several displaced people were sheltering in Ain al-Dalb, east of the coastal city of Saida, in southern Lebanon, according to rescue teams and paramedics on the scene.
On Monday afternoon the Ministry of Health said 45 people had been killed and 70 wounded in the strike, which caused the building's immediate collapse. In the earlier evening, an additional 12 bodies were recovered from the wreckage, where a crane had been brought in to lift away the concrete slabs that had collapsed in on what residents of the area told local media was a two-block residential building with around five stories each.
One Monday evening, the rescue operations were still underway, using bulldozers and jackhammers to dig through the rubble in search of many more people thought to be buried underneath.
The victims include nine members of the Fares family who had fled to Saida from Aitaroun as Israeli bombings intensified across the South.
According to the Health Ministry's Monday afternoon update, at least 136 other people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon in the last 24 hours.
Israel's bombing campaign across southern Lebanon, the Bekaa, and Beirut's southern suburbs in the last two week have killed more than 1,100 people. Since the conflict began in October, when Hezbollah opened a front with Israel in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza, almost 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli strikes, including hundreds of civilians.
Last week, on Sept. 26, the U.S. and France, Israel and Lebanon's number one allies respectively, presented their plan for an immediate 21-day cease-fire proposal. The next day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly without once acknowledging the proposal and that evening, his army bombed Beirut's southern suburbs in at least 12 separate airstrikes, the first of which used 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs and killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Reporting contributed by Muntasser Abdallah, L'Orient Today's correspondent in the South.