The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck several Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, keeping the country on edge over a fragile cease-fire, as its forces pressed on with their campaign in Gaza with little sign of letting up.
The cease-fire in Lebanon forged this week ended months of destructive airstrikes and fighting, but it is still not clear when all of the roughly one million people displaced from their homes will be permitted to safely return. Under the deal, Israeli forces are to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon over 60 days, as Hezbollah fighters also retreat north of the Litani River.
The Israeli military said it hit a site at the Lebanon-Syria border that was “actively being used” by Hezbollah to to transport weapons to Lebanon from Syria, in what it called a violation of the cease-fire agreement.
It also said it struck three other sites in southern Lebanon where it had observed militants either “approaching Hezbollah structures,” loading vehicles with weapons or engaging in “terrorist activity” at a Hezbollah facility. It declined to provide further details about any of those strikes.
Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the strikes. Israel struck at least two other sites that it described as Hezbollah infrastructure this week after the cease-fire went into effect on Wednesday.
Despite the sporadic attacks, the cease-fire appeared to largely hold in Lebanon. In Gaza, any pause in the war feels distant.
Israel is pressing a weekslong offensive in northern Gaza that has continued to isolate the area. Dozens of people were killed in Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza on Friday and more were trapped under debris, according to emergency rescue workers in the territory.
Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, an emergency response group, said it believed that more than 75 people had been killed in strikes in Beit Lahia, a farming town north of Gaza City, although it said it had been unable to reach the site because of an Israeli blockade. Civil Defense does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its death tolls, but it said that families were among the dead.
“Entire families were wiped out in northern Gaza and we don’t know anything about them,” the group said in a statement on Friday night. “And there are survivors who remain under the rubble for a long time, and there is no civil defense to rescue them.”
Rescue workers have been unable to operate in northern Gaza since an Israeli offensive began almost two months ago. Internet and phone service to the area has also been unreliable in recent days, leaving rescue workers and the families of those killed and missing with few ways to obtain reliable information.
The Israeli military dismissed reports of airstrikes in Beit Lahia as “false Hamas propaganda” on Saturday, but said it was continuing its “counterterrorism activity against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”
The military “operates following precise and credible intelligence against Hamas terrorists and terror targets, not against the civilians in Gaza,” the military said in a statement. “We emphasize that the area in question is an active war zone.”
The Israeli military also said on Saturday that it had struck a Hamas fighter who took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that set off the war in Gaza.
Israel began a major military offensive in northern Gaza in early October to combat what its military describes as Hamas’s resurgence in the area. Local residents and aid groups say the humanitarian effect of the operation has been severe.
At the start of the offensive, the United Nations estimated that 400,000 people were trapped in the combat zone, and tens of thousands have fled the area since then. The fighting has also brought the flow of humanitarian aid and commerce in the north to a near standstill, leaving the civilian population with little access to food, water, medicine and other essentials.
Momen Ahmed, 27, said he spent hours fruitlessly calling his relatives and neighbors in Beit Lahia when he heard that there had been strikes nearby. “No internet or communications are there,” he said.
Finally Mr. Ahmed reached a neighbor, who he said told him that the family house had “been flattened and everyone who was inside the building when the strike took place must have been killed.”
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