Israel’s military urged residents of over 20 towns in south Lebanon to evacuate their homes immediately on Thursday as it pressed on with an incursion after suffering its worst losses in a year of fighting the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.
The call for evacuations from southern towns included the provincial capital Nabatieh, suggesting another Israeli operation designed to further weaken Hezbollah is imminent.
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Israel, which has been fighting with Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, sent its troops into southern Lebanon after two weeks of intense airstrikes, escalating tensions in a conflict that risks drawing in the United States and Iran.
The evacuation warnings came after Israel bombed central Beirut in an attack the Lebanese health ministry said killed nine people.
Reuters witnesses reported hearing a massive blast, which a security source said had targeted a building in the district of Bachoura a few hundred meters from parliament, the closest an Israeli strike has come to the central downtown district.
“Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent,” U.N. special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on X on Thursday.
A Hezbollah-linked civil defense group said seven of its staff, including two medics, had been killed in the Beirut attack, which Israel said was a “precise” airstrike.
