Israeli warplanes struck the southern Lebanese district of Nabatieh on Saturday, killing at least 11 people — including three children — and wounding 19 others in the deadliest single day of Israeli strikes since a US-brokered framework deal brought a significant reduction in hostilities in June. The raids sent hundreds of families fleeing north, clogging roads out of Nabatieh and surrounding villages.
Two strikes bore the brunt of the casualties. In the early hours of Saturday morning, warplanes bombed a home on the outskirts of Ansar, a village roughly 20 kilometres north of the Israeli border and outside Israel's self-declared security zone in the south, killing seven people and levelling the building. Hours later, a strike on a home in the town of Deir al-Zahrani killed two more and wounded nine. An Israeli drone also targeted a motorcycle in Nabatieh. The Israeli military said it had struck a central headquarters of Hezbollah's elite Radwan Force in the Ansar area, claiming it killed a sector commander, Ali Samir al-Haj Hassan, along with several fighters. It added that the operations were in response to a Hezbollah attack on Israeli soldiers in the Ali al-Taher area — a strategic ridge overlooking Nabatieh where Israel says Hezbollah maintains underground command centres — which left three soldiers seriously wounded. The Israeli military acknowledged that Hassan's family was present in the building at the time and said Hezbollah had deliberately placed civilians inside a military compound.
Lebanon's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam condemned the strikes as "extremely dangerous," saying the seven killed in Ansar were not military infrastructure and that women and children were not military targets. He called on Israel to halt the escalation. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun described the raids as a "clear message" directed at the ongoing negotiating process and US efforts to implement the framework agreement. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group that has dominated southern Lebanon for decades, threatened that the attacks would be "met with what they deserve" and accused Lebanese authorities of humiliating the country's armed forces by engaging in the US-sponsored talks.
The strikes come against a tense backdrop. The latest round of conflict began on 2 March when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel two days after the killing of Iran's supreme leader; subsequent Israeli air campaigns and a ground invasion killed more than 4,300 people in Lebanon and resulted in Israel occupying roughly 6 percent of Lebanese territory. A US-Iran memorandum of understanding in June, followed by a Lebanese-Israeli framework deal, substantially reduced the violence. That deal envisages the disarmament of Hezbollah, a gradual Israeli withdrawal, and the deployment of the Lebanese army in pilot zones — terms Hezbollah has flatly rejected. Lebanon's official news agency noted that one of Saturday's strikes, targeting a valley near Ansar, was the deepest Israeli strike into Lebanese territory in two months. An eighth round of US-mediated negotiations between Lebanon and Israel is scheduled to take place in Rome in early September.
The episode underscores how fragile the June arrangements remain. A spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said Saturday's strikes would "tighten up" the negotiations and make them "more serious and more real." A US State Department official, however, reiterated that a permanent Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon was not consistent with the commitments set out in the deal. Human rights organisations have urged the United Nations to maintain its peacekeeping force in Lebanon — known as UNIFIL — when its mandate comes up for renewal later this year, warning that peacekeepers serve as a crucial deterrent against attacks on civilians.