Lebanese official says Israeli strikes killed at least 12 emergency workers

Tel Aviv: As the Israeli military intensified a dayslong barrage of strikes south of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, at least 12 emergency rescue workers were killed Thursday in a strike on a civil defense center in the northeastern city of Baalbek, the regional governor said.

The city's civil defense chief, Bilal Raad, was among those found dead amid the rubble, said the governor, Bachir Khodr, who added that rescue operations were underway for any survivors.

"We know that there were more than 20 people inside," Khodr said of the center. "We haven't found anyone alive so far."

Lebanon's civil defense agency, which performs emergency and medical services, is an arm of the Lebanese state and is not controlled by or affiliated with Hezbollah, the militant group backed by Iran.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strikes in Baalbek. But the Israeli military has intensified strikes on Hezbollah's infrastructure in Lebanon and targeted its leaders for assassination since the group began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The strikes in Lebanon occurred the same day that Israeli fighter jets bombed sites in the Syrian capital, Damascus, that the military said were affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militia backed by Iran. The attacks killed at least 15 people and wounded 16 others, including women and children, according to Syrian state media.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the attack had "inflicted significant damage" to a command center belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The military blamed the Syrian government for allowing the militia to operate from its territory.

"We are conducting deep strikes and striking frequently in Syria and along the Syria-Lebanon border to prevent weapons transfers to Hezbollah," Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, said Tuesday.

The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said Israel struck the al-Mezzeh neighborhood in Damascus around 3:20 p.m. Thursday local time, damaging several buildings.

Iranian news media reported that an Israeli missile hit a building in Damascus close to where a prominent Iranian official, Ali Larijani, was meeting with the director of Syria's National Security Committee. Larijani was not injured, according to Khabar Online, an Iranian news agency.

Larijani, a former speaker of parliament who is currently a senior adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been on a "special mission" to Syria on behalf of Khamenei, Iranian news media reported. No further details were released.

Israel's military says it has killed a large number of Hezbollah fighters over the past week and has "struck and dismantled" more than 140 Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon.

For years, Israeli warplanes have quietly launched attacks in Syria in an effort, the military says, to prevent Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from operating there.

The Lebanese city of Baalbek and the wider region have seen intensifying bombardment in recent weeks. In a separate Israeli attack Thursday in the city's Al-Shaab neighborhood, eight other people, including five women, were killed and more than two dozen wounded, according to Lebanon's health ministry. An Israeli strike in the southern town of Arab Salim also killed six people, including four paramedics, the health ministry said.

More than 145 health workers in Lebanon have been killed while on duty since the war began, according to the World Health Organization.

The Biden administration and other mediators are attempting to broker a cease-fire in the yearlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. They hope that a diplomatic settlement could help end Israel's campaign against Hamas, also backed by Iran, and bring back the hostages held in Gaza.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, on Wednesday said that any agreement to end the fighting must force Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw from areas near the Israeli border. Israel has also demanded that it must be able to crack down on Hezbollah should it violate such a deal.

Hezbollah has so far given little indication that it would be willing to accept those demands. While the group has been battered by the war, it is still managing to put up a fight, firing scores of rockets and drones into Israel daily and killing six Israeli soldiers Wednesday in southern Lebanon.

Twenty-one people were killed Wednesday in Israeli attacks on Lebanon, bringing the total killed since October 2023 to at least 3,386, the Lebanese Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday. Those figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

In the meantime, the fighting has continued.

Lebanon's state news media said Israeli strikes Thursday also hit two neighborhoods of the Dahiya, the tightly packed cluster of neighborhoods adjoining Beirut that has been a frequent target of the Israeli military since it stepped up its air war in Lebanon at the end of September.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it had conducted "a series of intelligence-based strikes on Hezbollah weapons-storage facilities" in the Dahiya, which it called "a key Hezbollah terrorist stronghold."

The United States on Thursday voiced concerns over Israel's intensifying bombing campaign in the Dahiya.

"We do not want to see these kinds of operations in Beirut, especially as it relates to densely populated areas," a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, said when asked about the Israeli strikes at a news briefing.

The near-daily cross-border rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Israel have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in northern Israel.

In Gaza, Israel pressed ahead with a weekslong offensive in the northern part of the territory, which it says has become the locus of a Hamas resurgence. The military said Thursday that it had launched airstrikes and ground raids over the past day, killing Hamas fighters there.

Israel's offensive in northern Gaza has drawn international criticism for its heavy toll on civilians, several hundred thousand of whom became trapped there when the operation began last month, according to United Nations agencies. Tens of thousands have since fled their homes.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report that accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity for forcing nearly all of Gaza's 2.2 million Palestinians to flee their homes, and often advising them later to move from the places where they had sought shelter. Israel has said it warns residents to evacuate for their own safety.

"There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel's mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza's population, often multiple times," the report said. "Rather than ensuring civilians' security, military 'evacuation orders' have caused grave harm."

In a statement, Oren Marmorstein, a spokesperson for Israel's Foreign Ministry, called the report "detached from reality" and said Israel was working to uphold the international laws of war. "Israel views all civilian harm as a tragedy, while Hamas views all civilian harm as a strategy," Marmorstein added.