The Israeli military widened its campaign against the militant group Hezbollah on Wednesday, launching airstrikes around the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek and forcing large numbers of people to flee.
Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah, initially focused on smaller, border villages in the south, are expanding beyond the country’s periphery to port towns and urban centers where the group has supporters, including Baalbek, Tyre and Sidon. Famed for its towering Roman ruins, Baalbek, which had a population of about 80,000 people, had largely been spared Israeli bombardment until recent days.
“People are panicking,” said Ibrahim Bayan, a mayoral deputy in Baalbek, adding that about a dozen strikes had landed in or around the city since Israel issued its evacuation warnings on Wednesday. The Israeli military said it struck fuel depots belonging to Hezbollah, stocked with fuel supplied by Iran.
Against that backdrop of violence, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and two top White House officials are making a renewed diplomatic push to reach temporary cease-fire deals between Israel, Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s ally in Gaza, Hamas. Mr. Burns is expected to be in Cairo on Thursday for talks with Egyptian officials, aimed at refining a proposal to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza, according to a U.S. official and another person briefed on the talks.
Additionally, the White House officials Brett McGurk, who has been deeply involved in cease-fire talks, and Amos Hochstein, who has taken the lead on the Lebanon talks, will visit Israel on Thursday.
Israel is pushing for an arrangement in which Hezbollah would be given several weeks to withdraw its forces from the Israel-Lebanon border, allowing Lebanon’s official army — a weak force with little to no capacity to defend the country’s borders — to fill the void, according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. Israel also wants to be guaranteed the right to invade Lebanon if Hezbollah does not withdraw fast enough, the two officials said.
Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, suggested on Wednesday he was open to finding terms for a truce, but was far from agreeing to Israel’s demands. “If the Israelis decide to stop the aggression, we say we accept, but with the conditions that we see as appropriate and suitable,” he said in a prerecorded speech, his first as the group’s leader.
His warnings that Hezbollah would keep fighting came alongside Israel’s to Lebanese civilians. In a statement posted online on Wednesday, Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, posted a map showing Baalbek and two neighboring towns as part of a danger zone marked in red, with three authorized evacuation routes.
“The I.D.F. will act forcefully against Hezbollah interests within your city and villages and does not intend to harm you,” Mr. Adraee said. “For your safety, you must evacuate your homes immediately and move outside the city and villages.”
Two days earlier, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 60 people in the Bekaa district, which includes the city and its rural hinterland, Lebanese officials said. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 58 others were injured in the attacks.
The farmland and villages around the city of Baalbek have been hit by airstrikes repeatedly in recent weeks, leaving many small towns largely deserted. Mr. Bayan, the mayoral deputy, said this month that about two-thirds of the residents in the city itself had left their homes out of fear.
Mr. Bayan said that in the wake of Israel’s warnings, residents filled the roads, throwing their valuables into plastic bags, locking their houses and shuttering their shop doors. As people crammed into cars, they shouted to each other to determine the safest way to leave the city.
Others opted to remain in the city, unsure where they would go or how they would get there.
“Gas stations are closed, but even if they were open, people don’t have money to fill up their cars’ tanks,” said Mahmoud Zikra, a resident of Baalbek who remained home. “There are no vans or taxis — even if they were available no one can afford to hire them.”
The warning from Israel’s military included a village in Baalbek’s southern suburbs that connects the city to the region’s main highway, cutting off a standard route for residents trying to leave the valley.
Fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah continued elsewhere in Lebanon. On Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had struck more than 100 sites across the country in the previous 24 hours, including a rocket launch site used in a deadly strike on the Israeli town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha on Tuesday. It also said it had killed a large number of Hezbollah fighters in what it called “limited, localized, targeted raids.”
Mr. Adraee said one of the fighters killed by Israeli forces was Mustafa Ahmed Shehadi, whom he called a prominent commander in the group’s elite Radwan Force. Hezbollah did not comment on the claim.
On Tuesday night, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 people in the coastal city of Sidon in southern Lebanon, according to a report by the country’s national news agency. It said the strike injured at least 36 others. Until recently, attacks on Sidon, one of Lebanon’s largest cities, and the areas around it, had been rare.
Hezbollah said its forces had battled Israeli troops recently near the border town of Kfar Kila and the mountain town of Khiam, the former site of a prison camp run by allies of Israel during its two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s claims could not be independently verified. The national news agency reported that Israeli soldiers near Khiam were “attempting to infiltrate the town under heavy fire” on Wednesday and that Israel’s air force had conducted multiple raids on the area.
Andrea Tenenti, the spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon, told reporters on Wednesday that the conflict areas in southern Lebanon “are becoming much more dangerous” as shelling and airstrikes increase. He said the peacekeeping force, known as UNIFIL, was trying to help residents but that thousands of people were “stuck in villages without access to the basic needs.”
Eager to avert even more destruction in Gaza, as well, the international negotiators are trying to work on a smaller, simpler proposal that could prod both Israel and Hamas to soften their positions and resume bargaining in earnest.
But many officials in Washington remain pessimistic that either Hamas or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel would accept any terms in the near future, each for their own reasons.
Some Hamas leaders believe that the war is on the cusp of expanding further, fulfilling the hopes of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to U.S. officials. And Mr. Netanyahu, others say, is unlikely to make key concessions until after the U.S. presidential election, convinced that a Trump administration might revise the American approach to the conflict.
The post Israel Widens Hezbollah Strikes, Hitting Lebanese Cities Beyond Border Area appeared first on New York Times.
