The death toll in Lebanon has risen to 620, including children, as Israeli airstrikes continue for a third consecutive day.
Since Monday, the strikes have injured at least 2,055 people, according to Lebanon’s Health Minister, Firass Abiad. This marks the deadliest period of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.
On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed 51 people, including two rare strikes in mountainous areas outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds in the south and east. This came after Israeli strikes on Monday killed at least 569 people.
Hezbollah earlier said it had fired a ballistic missile that reached the central Israeli city of Tel Aviv for the first time before being intercepted.
The attacks in Lebanon included two rare strikes on the villages of Joun and Maaysra -- mountain areas outside Hezbollah's traditional strongholds in the country's south and east.
Fatima from Maaysra, declining to provide her surname, said the targeted two-storey building was her relative's home and housed people displaced from south Lebanon.
"They bombed an area full of displaced people," she said. "Nowhere is safe anymore."
An AFP correspondent at the site of the strike saw rescuers searching for survivors in the rubble of the targeted building and listening for any signs of life under the wreckage.
The village was filled with Hezbollah and Lebanese flags, he said.
Israel's army later said it was conducting strikes in the Nabatiyeh region of south Lebanon, with the state-run National News Agency reporting an Israeli strike had partly damaged a hospital there.
Nabatiyeh Governor Howaida Turk told AFP that the region's "only government hospital sustained damage as a result of the nearby strike," adding that no one had been injured.
The Israeli military said it hit more than 280 targets of Hezbollah in Lebanon on Wednesday after the Iran-backed fighters fired rockets into northern Israel.
"In total, over 280 Hezbollah terror targets have been struck today in Lebanon, and the IDF (military) is continuing to conduct strikes against additional targets," the military said in a statement.
Escalating clashes
The health ministry said the Israeli strike on the village of Joun in the Chouf mountains, southeast of Beirut, killed four people.
Another Israeli strike killed three people in Maaysra -- a Shiite-majority village in a mostly Christian mountain area about 25 kilometres north of Beirut.
Nine people were killed in Israeli strikes in the south and seven in eastern Lebanon, the ministry said.
Longtime foes Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in near-daily exchanges of cross-border fire since Palestinian fighter group Hamas launched an unprecedented resistance campaign on Israel on October 7.
The focus of Israel's firepower has shifted sharply from Gaza to Lebanon in recent days.
The airstrikes came after coordinated explosions of communication devices killed 39 people and wounded thousands on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.
Those were followed by a deadly strike on Friday on south Beirut, with leading Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil among the dead.
