MONITORING (SW) – The mayor of one of the largest cities in southern Lebanon has been killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit the city’s municipal headquarters during a meeting to coordinate aid deliveries to residents and those displaced by war.
The strike, one of a series on Nabatieh on Wednesday morning, killed 16 people and wounded 52, the Lebanese health ministry said. Howaida Turk, the governor of Nabatieh province, said members of the provincial capital’s crisis committee were meeting at the time, reported Guardian.
It was the most significant Israeli hit yet on a Lebanese state institution since fighting between Israel and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah broke out a year ago, and followed a week of intensifying aerial bombardment across Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the UN’s human rights office on Wednesday called for an investigation into an Israeli airstrike that killed 24 people on Monday in the Christian-majority village of Aitou, in northern Lebanon. The strike hit a residential block rented out to families displaced from fighting in Lebanon’s south. All of those killed were displaced people.
The UN human rights spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said the UN had “real concerns with respect to [international humanitarian law]” surrounding the strike.
Raymond Alwan, an official in the Aitou municipality, said the strike had left people there “terrified” and that those who had hosted displaced people feared their homes would be struck next. Alwan said the municipality was ensuring that the rights of displaced people would still be respected, “under the condition that they do not bring us any problems”.
More than 2,350 people have been killed and 10,906 wounded in Lebanon since Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023 in solidarity with Hamas’s attack a day earlier, starting a year of fighting. Most of the casualties are from the last month of fighting.
