Beirut, Oct 16 (IANS) At least 10 people were killed, and 15 others wounded in a violent Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported.
TV footage showed that the airstrike, targeting residential buildings in the town of Qana, 10 km southeast of the city of Tyre, caused a massive fire and destroyed the buildings and nearby vehicles, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.
According to the National News Agency, civil defence teams and firefighters rushed to the scene to extinguish the fire and transport the casualties to hospitals in Tyre.
Since September 23, the Israeli army has been conducting unprecedented, intensive airstrikes on Lebanon in a sharp escalation with Hezbollah.
The death toll from Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon since the beginning of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict on October 8, 2023, has reached 2,350, while injuries went up to 10,906, Health Ministry figures showed on Tuesday.
Israel has mounted a huge air campaign in Lebanon against what it claims are Hezbollah targets since September 23, killing more than 1,500 people and displacing more than one million.
The aerial campaign is an escalation from a year of cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of its offensive on the Gaza Strip, in which Israel has killed nearly 42,400 people, most of them women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.
Israel expanded the conflict on October 1 by launching an incursion into southern Lebanon.
–IANS
int/khz
