Israel strikes back at Beirut, Lebanon; Hezbollah launches drones in Israel | Israel attacks Lebanon News

The Israeli military said Hezbollah was hitting targets as its attacks caused mass civilian displacement in Lebanon.

Israel bombed Lebanon’s capital Beirut for the second day in a row as Hezbollah said it would attack an airbase in northern Israel, as another front flared up in the regional war sparked by the United States-Israel attack on Iran.

Fresh Israeli airstrikes hit the Haret Hraik area of ​​Beirut’s Dahiyeh southern suburbs on Tuesday, following at least two strikes on the southern outskirts of the Lebanese capital.

The Israeli military issued forced evacuation notices for some 59 areas in Lebanon, including several neighborhoods in Dahiyeh, traditionally seen as a base of support for Hezbollah with a large Shiite population.

In a post on Telegram, it said it was hitting “Hezbollah command centers and weapons storage facilities in Beirut.”

Civilians across Lebanon have been continuously caught in the crosshairs of Israeli attacks in Lebanon and suffered thousands of deaths and mass displacement during the year-long war from 2023-2024 and daily Israeli violations of the ceasefire until the eruption of this new conflict in the days that followed.

Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett, reporting from Beirut, said it had led to a “wave of displacement”. “We’ve seen civilians get out of there since these strikes started,” Pett said.

“School children are not going to school this morning because the schools in Beirut, many of them are closed to accommodate thousands and thousands of displaced people from the southern suburbs.”

Hezbollah earlier said it launched an attack on Ramat David air base in northern Israel early Tuesday morning by deploying a “swarm of drones” targeting radar sites and control rooms.

The Lebanese group added that the attack was in retaliation for Israel’s attacks in several areas of Lebanon.

On Monday, Israeli attacks in Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon killed at least 52 people and wounded 154, state media said. The airstrikes followed Hezbollah’s barrage of missiles and drones toward an Israeli military site in the northern city of Haifa, the first in more than a year.

The Lebanese government declared Hezbollah’s “military activities”, which operate independently of the state, illegal and called on security forces to “prevent any attacks from Lebanese territory”.

Hezbollah said the ban was not justified. “We understand the vulnerability of the Lebanese government in the face of brutal Zionist enemies who violate national sovereignty, occupy land and pose a constant threat to the country’s security and stability,” Hezbollah said, adding that it was the government’s right to “decide war and peace.”

“However, given this obvious weakness and shortcoming, we see no justification for Prime Minister Salam and his government to take such aggressive measures against Lebanese who reject employment,” it said.