Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has called on Washington and the international community to intervene after strikes on Sunday killed at least four people, despite an existing truce and framework agreement between the Zionist entity and Lebanon.
The Zionist entity said it targeted Hezbollah operatives and sites in response to a drone attack a day earlier by the Iran-backed group on its troops in a strategic south Lebanon ridge area. The Zionist entity reported no troop casualties but accused Hezbollah of a “blatant violation”. This week, the Zionist entity claimed it had captured the Nabatieh-area Ali Al-Taher ridge, which it considers part of its self-declared “security zone” in south Lebanon. Hezbollah has not commented on this declaration.
According to Lebanon’s health ministry, two people were killed in strikes on south Lebanon’s Nabatieh Al-Fawqa, with two women also killed in nearby Arab Salim. Twenty other people, including several women and three children, were wounded in those areas as well as in Nabatieh city and the town of Kfar Rumman.
One strike in Nabatieh Al-Fawqa “totally destroyed” the out-of-service Ghandour hospital. The ministry condemned this as “another grave violation of international humanitarian law”. The Zionist entity’s army said it targeted a Hezbollah command centre that had been established inside a building previously used as a hospital, along with weapons storage facilities and other infrastructure.
The Zionist entity issued its first evacuation notice in Lebanon in a month, warning residents near a building it identified as a Hezbollah facility in Arab Salim to leave. However, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency, after this warning, warplanes launched a strike on another house, destroying it and killing two women. A second strike then hit the building that had been threatened in the evacuation warning. An AFP correspondent at the scene saw a devastated villa with a toppled decorative column. Haidar Haidar, brother of the building’s owner, told AFP that nobody had been living inside.
Nabatieh Mayor Abbas Fakhreddine stated that “the Lebanese government must take action… and at the least defend its institutions”, noting this was the second time official buildings had been damaged by strikes.
President Aoun called Sunday’s strikes “a dangerous escalation… reaching Lebanese state institutions” and urged the United States, which sponsored the June framework agreement between the sides, to “urgently act to stop these violations”.
Lebanon was drawn into the wider Middle East conflict in March after Hezbollah attacked the Zionist entity in support of Iran. Violence has decreased since a US-Iran memorandum of understanding in June and the subsequent framework agreement, though Zionist entity forces continue operating in a self-declared “security zone” around 10 kilometres deep inside Lebanon along the border.
Source: Kuwait Times
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