BEIRUT — Israeli forces pounded Beirut on Wednesday, killing scores of people in an aerial barrage that Israel described as its largest in more than a month of war in Lebanon, just after the United States and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that it supported Trump’s two-week suspension of attacks on Iran but that the truce would not stop Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said Israeli strikes killed at least 182 people across the country Wednesday and injured an additional 890 — a preliminary toll. Lebanon’s Civil Defense said search-and-rescue teams were working through the night to pull more people from the rubble.
People across Lebanon had hoped the broader truce would also give their country a respite. But within hours of the announcement, loud bangs rocked the capital as airstrikes hit without warning, including near schools, commercial districts and the country’s only international airport.
Hospitals issued appeals for blood donations, and the doctors union urged health care workers to rush to medical centers to help treat the wounded. Columns of smoke rose from Beirut and other parts of the country, including the southern city of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast.
The Israeli military said it struck more than 100 targets in a span of 10 minutes, including in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that his forces hit Hezbollah militants in “surprise attacks” and that Israel has “insisted on differentiating the arenas between Iran and Lebanon in order to change the reality in Lebanon.” Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel last month in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli attack that killed the supreme leader of its patron Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said that the Israeli attacks Wednesday “targeted densely populated residential areas and claimed the lives of innocent civilians throughout Lebanon, particularly in Beirut.” He called on allies to “help us stop these attacks by all available means.”
Nada Saliba, an anchor at Lebanon’s public broadcaster, was just leaving work and heading to her car to rush home when a strike collapsed half of a residential building near her Beirut office.
“All I was thinking about was my two children,” she said, sobbing. “I don’t want them to mourn me.”
The Lebanese government, whose appointment had been backed by Washington, has scrambled for weeks to avert a wider escalation. Authorities have appealed to the Trump administration and Western allies, including France, to intervene and have offered to engage in once-taboo negotiations with Israel.
But with the Trump administration focused on Iran, Israel has rejected the Lebanese overtures, seizing on the timing to wipe out the threat of Hezbollah’s volleys of rockets and drones that have displaced residents of northern Israel in past wars.
Israel has launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, ordered residents out of more than 10 percent of the country, destroyed bridges that link the south to the rest of Lebanon and announced plans to raze homes in Lebanese villages near the border. Katz has said some 600,000 displaced residents of southern Lebanon “will not be allowed to return until the security of northern residents is guaranteed,” stoking fears of another long-term Israeli occupation.
The Israeli offensive has killed more than 1,700 people, including at least 130 children, according to Lebanese authorities, and forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes. Authorities have not released separate figures for civilians and combatants.
Israel says that 12 of its soldiers have been killed in combat in Lebanon, and that Hezbollah rockets killed two people in Israel, over the same period.
Hezbollah on Wednesday denounced the Israeli assault, pledging to “resist the occupation and respond to its aggression,” without elaborating on its response.
The escalation in Lebanon spurred questions about whether Washington’s deal with Tehran would hold, with traffic in the Strait of Hormuz appearing to remain at a standstill. Israeli assertions about excluding Lebanon contradicted an earlier statement from Pakistan, the main mediator in ceasefire talks.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, warned of a military response if the strikes on Lebanon did not stop.
While Tehran said it saw a halt in Israeli strikes on Hezbollah as part of the terms of the ceasefire agreement announced Tuesday, and listed the ongoing attacks among what it called ceasefire violations, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that the deal did not cover Lebanon
In an initial statement announcing the ceasefire, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who served as a mediator, had said the sides “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.”
“I think this comes from a legitimate misunderstanding,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters while visiting Budapest on Wednesday. “I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, who had sought to broker a ceasefire for Lebanon, welcomed the announcement of a halt in fighting between the United States and Iran on Wednesday but said including Lebanon was “indispensable.”
“The situation is critical,” he told a French cabinet meeting. “What we are seeing, with the attacks and the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, cannot be a long-term response.”
Macron also said France would intensify efforts to end the hostilities and seek to boost support for the Lebanese army “to fully regain control of the territory and effectively counter Hezbollah.”
The leaders of several European nations including France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, along with Japan and Canada, said Wednesday that they welcomed the two-week pause in the war with Iran and called on “all sides to implement the ceasefire, including in Lebanon.”
Francis reported from Brussels. Suzan Haidamous in Beirut, Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv and Isaac Arnsdorf in Washington contributed to this report.
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