Mariam Ghuel, 31, has been fleeing the bombings for eleven months without success. On October 11, three days after Hezbollah launched its first projectiles at Israeli targets and began crossfire, he escaped from Mays al Yabl, his small town in the southeast that almost touches Israel, to Dahiye, the large Shiite suburb of Beirut that abandoned “the day they bombed so much”: last day the 24th, when the Israeli army killed 558 people in a few hours. He has ended up in a school converted into a shelter in Bashura, a neighborhood in the heart of Beirut considered safe and not far from the Government headquarters. That is where, around midnight, he heard the bombing of a building a few dozen meters away, the deadliest, with a provisional toll of nine dead, of the two attacks that Israel has launched in the capital since it began its operations. offensive, last month, now accompanied by a ground invasion and the request for new evacuations to continue the operation.
“Here I felt safer than in Dahiye, because I am in a shelter and there was nothing political or military here,” she says, pointing to the hole left by the missile. It was, as the white flags placed on the damaged walls remind us, the headquarters of the Islamic Committee for Health, a health and charitable organization linked to Hezbollah. The seven dead are, in fact, committee workers and volunteers.
There were three impacts in a row, without prior warning, which caused a cloud of black smoke over the city, as Morning Express was able to verify. At street level, the result shows a very localized bombing, which has barely damaged the other nine floors of the building. Ghuel, however, heard it so close, from the school yard where he takes refuge with his children, that he thought it was against the school itself. “People started screaming, children started crying… […] I don’t feel safe here anymore, but I don’t have alternatives either. Where am I going? We spend each day not knowing if we will end it alive or dead,” says Ghuel.
Imad Hiyazi heard it even closer, because he lives in the same building and went down to the street in his pajamas among the glass and smoke. He says that the property houses 84 apartments “and in each one there are at least two families,” because “practically all of them” host displaced people from the south. “If we dare to live here and open our doors to other people, it is only because we feel safe, because we know that Hezbollah does not keep a single bullet here. What we have found on the ground are not weapons or bullets, but serum and bandages,” he protests. It is the idea that Kamal al Zuhur, a member of the Civil Defense of the Islamic Committee for Health, insists on: “The victims were people who were in charge of transporting the wounded or sick, and of helping the [centenares de miles de] displaced” from the south, the Becá Valley and Dahiye, the most bombed areas.
Israel has previously bombed ambulances and toilets of organizations linked to Hezbollah, considering them part of the organization or disguised militiamen.
In the south where Ghuel comes from is where Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militiamen have been fighting since at least this Wednesday. The army lost eight men, in its worst day against the Shiite militia since the fighting began a year ago. In addition to the capital, Israeli warplanes maintain pressure on militia positions there. Their main target during the night was a municipal building in the town of Bint Jbeil, about three kilometers from the border between the two countries. Hezbollah militiamen operated there with “large quantities” of weapons, according to the army’s version. In the operation, about 15 of them died, out of a total of 60 in the last 24 hours, military sources add.
A Lebanese army soldier, who remains on the sidelines of the fighting, has also died. It was in an Israeli airstrike, while working on an evacuation and rescue mission with the Lebanese Red Cross in the town of Tayba, in the south. The Red Cross recalled in a statement that it “always” coordinates its movements with the UN mission in Lebanon, Unifil (which transfers information to Israel) and reported that four of its volunteers have been injured.
At the same time, Hezbollah continues to launch dozens of missiles and some drones towards Israeli territory, where since the early hours of Thursday the alarms have been sounding about possible impacts. One of those drones was intercepted over the sea near Nahariya, a dozen kilometers from the border, and another fell without causing damage or victims, according to military sources.
Replicating the strategy implemented in Gaza, where the vast majority of the 2.3 million inhabitants have been expelled from their homes, the army has warned the inhabitants of a large score of towns in southern Lebanon to leave their homes because The troops consider those towns a war zone, according to a statement. It is something that he had already done with other enclaves in recent weeks.
“Evacuate your homes immediately. Be careful, it is prohibited to go south. Any path to the south means exposing oneself to danger,” a military spokesperson warned, giving details of the instructions on the social network X (formerly Twitter). “Anyone who is close to Hezbollah members, facilities and combat assets is putting their life in danger. “It is planned that any house used by Hezbollah for its military activities will be considered a target,” the announcement added.
This Thursday, Israel announced the deaths of three Hamas officials in Gaza, whom it allegedly killed in an attack carried out in the north of the enclave three months ago. Among them, Ruhi Mashtaha, head of the Government of the fundamentalist group in the Strip and whom Israel considered one of the men closest to Yahia Sinwar, mastermind of the massive attack on October 7 and new leader of the movement, after the murder of Ismail Haniye , in July in Tehran. “Hamas did not announce their deaths, as it has done after other previous eliminations, in order to avoid a loss of morale,” the statement said.
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