No region in Lebanon is safe from Israeli bombing | International

There is no longer a safe place in Lebanon. Rescue teams wrapped up their efforts early Tuesday morning to find victims of an Israeli airstrike the day before in Ain Yaaqoub that killed at least fourteen people and injured dozens. The village, 124 kilometers north of Beirut, is located in Akkarthe northernmost region of Lebanon. It was the only area so far that had not been attacked and was considered relatively safe as it was more than 200 kilometers from the border with Israel, the main front line of the fighting. That safety has turned out to be a mirage.

Even before Israel launched its program massive bombings on September 23The narrative from Israeli leaders and the military command was that their enemy was not Lebanon or the Lebanese, but Hezbollah, the Shia party militia that has been shelling northern Israel in solidarity with Gaza since October 2023. Since then, Israeli attacks have killed 3,365 people. people and 14,344 injured in Lebanon, according to the latest death toll released by the Health Ministry on Wednesday. With the deaths in Ain Yaqoub, that toll now comes from all regions of the country.

When Israel launched its ground offensive in southern Lebanon on October 1, the army described the operation as “limited, localized and targeted ground attacksagainst militia targets. However, Israeli soldiers have not refrained from destroying about forty villages near the southern border. Their attacks have also destroyed at least 40,000 homes.

This destruction is not always the result of bombings or artillery attacks, but because the infantry in these cities have blown up houses and infrastructure. This is made clear by the videos they have posted themselves, such as the videos showing the destruction of most of Meiss Ej Jabala city located next to the Blue Line, the unofficial demarcation drawn up by the United Nations between Israel and Lebanon. Soldiers have planted Israeli flags in some agricultural fields in the city.

A video released by Israeli soldiers on November 8 showed them burning the red and white Lebanese national flag in the same city, instead of Hezbollah’s yellow flag. Like the numbers of victims and the scale of destruction, these images compromise the official Israeli narrative that this war is only against the party militia; therefore, Israel is forced to disown these soldiers. The army’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, posted a tweet on Saturday saying the act was “not in line with the objectives” of what he called “military activities” in Lebanon. However, the spokesperson did not announce any sanctions against the soldiers.

The Israeli attacks initially targeted the Shia-majority areas where Hezbollah has its social base: southern Lebanon, the suburb of Dahieh in Beirut – which was again heavily bombed on Tuesday and Wednesday – and the eastern Bekaa Valley. By the end of October, the offensive had already spread to other parts of the country. The UN coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, warned at the time that “the scale and intensity of the firefights continued to expand.”

The bombing of Ain Yaaqoub in Akkar has closed this circle, reaching all regions of a country where 1.2 million people displaced by the war – one in five Lebanese, most of whom are Shiites – have sought refuge outside their place of residence.

Books and shoes

Almat is one of those remote towns far from the border where 10,000 displaced people have arrived in search of safety, Mayor Ali Awad told this newspaper on Monday. The city, whose residents are mainly Shiites, is located on a hill 48 kilometers northeast of Beirut, in a region with a Christian majority.

On Sunday, one of the residents, Nur, saw two Israeli fighter planes fly over. “I knew they were going to attack my village, but I didn’t know they were targeting the house next door,” he explains. Many children live in that house, which has now been reduced to rubble by a rocket, displaced people from the Bekaa Valleywere taking shelter. Of the 27 dead that rescue teams pulled from the rubble, seven were children. Five arrived dead in the emergency room of the nearby Notre Dame Maritime hospital. “They were between five and ten years old and completely deformed,” nurse Rosie Khoury explained by phone.

In the ruins lies a math book with addition and subtraction, with the owner’s name written in childish handwriting: Talea Safiedine. Not far away lies the rubble mixed with a pile of shoes: they all don’t match, most of them are small. Some decorated with small flowers and glitter hearts. In the middle of this place of desolation lies a pack of sanitary towels with the plastic torn off.

“There were women and children living here, and we are almost 200 kilometers from the border with Israel. Was it necessary to send an F-35 (fighter plane) to bomb the house?” the mayor wonders aloud as he picks up a pair of children’s pants with a stick. In the house, he exclaims, “there were no Hezbollah weapons. While we were clearing the rubble with a bulldozer, the television channels came and recorded everything: where are these weapons?”

When Israel justifies its attacks, which is not always the case – as in the case of the Almat bombing – it usually claims that the targeted buildings sheltered militants, or that they were used to hide Hezbollah weapons.

“Even if it were true that a fighter was hiding here, couldn’t the Israelis have just killed him without deleting three families from the civil register?” asks the mayor. He then shows on his mobile phone a photo with a list of the names of the dead, members of the Al Karsifi, Al Hussein and Zrik families.

“Jews suffered from the Holocaust in Europebut what is happening here is a new Holocaust,” says Awad. He believes Israel is “attacking places like Almat to kill as many women and children as possible and to sow terror.” He also believes this is to prevent the Lebanese from ‘accepting the displaced’.

The fear of such rejection has a real basis. Bombings such as the one that killed 21 people in late October in a house rented by displaced people in the predominantly Christian town of Aitou, about 90 kilometers north of Beirut, have fueled this suspicion. Although incidents involving the reception of displaced persons between different religious denominations – the majority of which are Christian, Sunni and Shia – have so far been incidental and never serious, some Lebanese express fears that their Shia compatriots who have fled their homes will be hit by Israeli fighter jets could attract and rockets.

The population of Akkar, the northern region that was the last to suffer the country’s first massacre, is predominantly Sunni and also home to Orthodox Christians. Considered a breeding ground for the Lebanese army, the presence of soldiers and the distance from the border with Israel likely helped convince some Shiite displaced persons that they would be protected there. “Here, with so many soldiers, I feel safe,” Fatima, a Shiite who had to flee Dahieh and found shelter in the city of Akkar al-Atiqa, told this newspaper on Saturday.

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