TEL AVIV, Israel — Rocket fire from Lebanon into northern Israel killed four foreign workers and three Israelis on Thursday, Israeli doctors said. These are the deadliest cross-border strikes in Israel since the invasion of Lebanon. Israel continued its airstrikes targeting, it said, Hezbollah fighters across Lebanon, where health authorities reported 24 deaths on Thursday.
US diplomats were in the region to push for a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza, hoping to end wars in the Middle East as the Biden administration enters its final stages month. Pressure is mounting ahead of next week’s US elections.
In northern Gaza, Israeli forces struck one of the last functioning hospitals, according to the World Health Organization, destroying much-needed supplies the U.N. agency had delivered to the facility. The strikes sparked a fire that hit the dialysis unit, destroyed water tanks, damaged the surgery building and injured four doctors who were trying to put out the fire, the hospital director said. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.
The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on a strike on the hospital, which it stormed last week after claiming it was housing Hamas fighters. Gaza’s Health Ministry on Thursday condemned Israeli attacks on the hospital and called on the international community to protect medical facilities in Gaza.
Consecutive deadly rocket attacks hit Israel
Projectiles from Lebanon crashed into an agricultural area in Metula, Israel’s northernmost town, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer, local officials said Thursday.
Hours later, the Israeli military reported another volley of some 25 rockets from Lebanon, hitting an olive grove in a suburb of the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. The strike killed a 30-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman and injured two others, said Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization.
Both Hezbollah and Hamas are supported by Iran, Israel’s regional adversary. Hezbollah did not immediately claim responsibility for Thursday’s rocket attacks. The Israeli military said 90 projectiles were fired from Lebanon on Thursday.
Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel – and unleashed fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes – in the year since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack from the Gaza Strip sparked Israel’s devastating war in the Palestinian enclave.
The residents of Metula were evacuated in October 2023, and only security guards and farm workers remain. The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli organization that advocates for foreign workers, said authorities had put them in danger by allowing them to work along the border without adequate protection.
Agricultural areas near the Israeli border are closed military zones that can only be entered with official permission. For the few remaining residents, the sound of interceptions by the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system and the wailing sirens of air raids punctuate daily life.
Nonetheless, local officials largely support the continuation of a ground operation in southern Lebanon.
“If the Israeli government adheres to a deal proposed by (the Biden administration)… we will not get it because for us it amounts to rehabilitating Hezbollah on our borders,” said Eitan Davidi, mayor of the town of Margaliot , in the north of the country.
Israel bombs Lebanon after evacuation warnings
Israeli strikes killed 24 people on Thursday in Lebanon, including 13 people in the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, according to the official Lebanese news agency National News, a day after the Israeli army warned the residents to evacuate.
The warnings sent thousands fleeing and spread panic in the city, known for its colossal Roman ruins.
The Lebanese Ministry of Health reported that over the past 24 hours, Israeli bombardments killed 45 people and injured 110 in various parts of the country.
Jean Fakhry, a local official in the Deir al-Ahmar region of the Bekaa Valley, said Israeli airstrikes that hit the area turned the main road into a “parking lot” for fleeing cars stuck in the road. traffic.
About 12,000 displaced people remain in the region, he said, with most sheltering in private homes. At one of the shelters in Deir al-Ahmar, families were still arriving with luggage on Thursday.
“Our homes were destroyed,” said Zahraa Younis, from the village near Baalbek. “We came with nothing, no clothes or anything else.”
US officials are in the region seeking a ceasefire
Top White House aides Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein were in Israel Thursday for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials about the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah.
The meetings focused on efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon and evaluate new proposals put forward by mediators to free Israeli hostages held in Gaza, according to a U.S. official familiar with planning for the talks. and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. The meetings took place in the presence of Netanyahu as well as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister; David Barnea, director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency; and other officials.
But with Tuesday’s U.S. election, hopes for immediate progress appear distant – particularly in Gaza, where Israel has been criticized for not allowing more humanitarian aid into the besieged north.
The death toll from more than a year of war in Gaza surpassed 43,000 earlier this week, Palestinian health officials reported.
Awda Hospital in central Gaza said Thursday evening it had received 16 bodies of people killed by Israeli bombing of two houses in the Nuseirat refugee camp. The hospital said more than 30 other people, including a doctor and two journalists, were injured.
Over the past year, Israel’s widening campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon has killed 2,865 people, injured more than 13,000 and devastated Lebanese towns near the border.
In Lebanon, some 1.2 million people have been displaced since Israel turned the conflict into a full-blown war last month, when it launched a wave of heavy airstrikes that killed Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and most of his deputies.
A year of Hezbollah rocket fire also forced 60,000 Israelis to evacuate near the border.
Frankel reported from Jerusalem and Tawil from Deir al-Ahmar, Lebanon. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Matt Lee in Washington and Eleanor H. Reich in New York contributed to this report.
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