A view of a damaged site after an Israeli strike in Nabatieh in southern Lebanon on Oct. 16, 2024. (Credit: Ali Hankir/Reuters)
Wednesday was a particularly deadly and destructive day in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army bombed the city hall in Nabatieh, one of southern Lebanon's largest cities, killing 16 people, including the city's mayor, several members of the municipal council, and members of the Civil Defense as they were holding a meeting to coordinate relief and aid efforts in the city. The army also razed to the ground the entire village of Mhaybib, located on a hill about two kilometers from the Blue Line, and once again fire artillery shells at UNIFIL watch towers.
The Nabatieh attack wounded more than 50 people in the city, which is the capital of Nabatieh district and used to be home to tens of thousands of people, many of whom fled when Israel stepped up its bombing campaign across southern Lebanon more than three weeks ago. Around 15 airstrikes were carried out on the city and its surroundings around 10 a.m. on Wednesday, creating a ring of fire using high caliber missiles whose explosions were heard as far as the coastal city of Saida, more than 20 kilometers away.
Israel once against claimed to be hitting Hezbollah targets, referring, as usual, to "command centers" and "weapons storage facilities," which it said were "embedded by Hezbollah adjacent to civilian infrastructure." Hezbollah is a prominent political party as well as a militant group and Israel is known to go by broad definitions with regards to Hezbollah affiliation, often not specifying who exactly it targets, but referring to "terrorists" in general.
The governor of Nabatieh district told L'Orient Today that the city's mayor, Ahmad Kahil, had been in the process of chairing a meeting attended by various members of the city council, Civil Defense teams, and a local relief team that, according to the New York Times, had worked alongside the United Nations over the last year of cross-border fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.
The bodies of those who had been meeting that morning to organize their relief operations for the residents who remained in the city, enduring daily Israeli strikes, were trapped under the rubble for hours after the attack, victims of the same fate they had been working to protect their residents from.
"The municipality president and other council members refused to leave the city, in order to help the residents who remained there," Governor Hwaida Turk said. "They served the people until their last moments."
In Mhaybib, the Israeli army filmed a video reminiscent of dozens that came out of Gaza, in which soldiers stand in the foreground and cheer as they trigger planted explosives that, in an instant, turn a small southern Lebanese village into dozens of plumes of black smoke.
The Israeli army claimed in an accompanying statement that it was Nabatieh city which was detonated. It's unclear whether its spokesperson was mistaken or being willfully misleading. The village was confirmed by various sources to be Mhaybib, which journalist Timour Azhari, head of Reuters' Baghdad bureau, said had been emptied of its residents some time earlier.
Amid international outcry, particularly from the dozen or so European countries who have citizens serving in the U.N. peacekeeping mission, UNIFIL reported, once again, that the Israeli army had fired on one of its bases. UNIFIL peacekeepers in Kfar Kila watched an Israeli Merkava tank fire at their watchtower, destroying two cameras and damaging the towers. This is the latest in a string of attacks by Israel against the peacekeeping mission, one of which involved bulldozing down the borderline around another UNIFIL base and moving its tanks into the area.
Israeli operations in Lebanon have killed at least 2,350 people over the last year, according to the latest toll from Health Ministry, while around 50 Israelis have been killed by Hezbollah in the same period. The U.N. says a quarter of Lebanon is under evacuation orders from the Israeli army.