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An Israeli air strike killed the mayor of a southern Lebanese city and at least five other local government officials after it struck the municipal headquarters.
The attack on Nabatiyeh raised fears that Israel is widening its campaign against Hizbollah’s Shia militants to include government offices and civilian officials. It was the first major strike on such buildings since the latest Israeli offensive began.
The attack, in which 43 were injured, also suggested that Israeli targets now include Amal, a powerful Shia political party allied to Hizbollah that plays a role in the municipal government and has a strong presence in the area.
“It’s a complete massacre, and the numbers of dead and wounded are still rising,” Hwaida Turk, the provincial governor, told the Financial Times, confirming the deaths of mayor Ahmad Kaheel and the committee members.
Those killed alongside Kaheel included at least four members of the city’s crisis committee tasked with organising relief efforts for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced since Israel escalated its air campaign in Lebanon at the end of last month, she said.
Israel’s military said it struck dozens of Hizbollah infrastructure targets in the Nabatiyeh area that “were embedded” adjacent to civilian infrastructure.
Nabatiyeh, predominantly Shia, is one of southern Lebanon’s most important cities. Both Hizbollah and its long-time allies from Amal have a presence in the city, though Amal dominates its local politics. Unlike Hizbollah, Amal does not have a well-organised military force.
But it does have an armed wing and some of its fighters have died alongside Hizbollah militants in the fighting throughout the past year.
Nabih Berri, leader of Amal, has been the speaker of parliament for more than three decades and is the main interlocutor for the US, western and Arab states that have been trying to negotiate an end to the conflict.
Seven dead and 16 injured people were transported to Najdeh Chaabia Hospital near Nabatiyeh, said the hospital’s general director Mona Abouzeid. She added that rescue workers were still searching for casualties. One of the dead was a civil defence employee.
Video footage from the area showed the centre of the city engulfed in plumes of smoke from several buildings.
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Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the attack, which he said struck the Nabatiyeh officials while they were in a meeting to discuss the city’s relief efforts.
Mikati accused the international community of being “deliberately silent” about Israeli strikes that have killed civilians and injured UN peacekeepers.
“What solution can be hoped for in light of this reality?” he said in a statement.
Israeli forces escalated their campaign against Hizbollah less than a month ago, destroying swaths of southern Lebanese villages and hitting the southern Beirut suburb where Hizbollah had its headquarters, killing many top militant commanders in air strikes, including leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Lebanese authorities say Israeli bombing has killed more than 2,300 people and injured almost 11,000, mostly in the past three weeks.
More than a quarter of Lebanon has been told to evacuate by Israel, according to the UN, with over 1.2mn people displaced, most over the past two weeks since Israel began incursions into the south of the country that it says are aimed at rooting out Hizbollah militants.
As with most of southern Lebanon, Israel had threatened residents of Nabatiyeh and told them to leave on October 3, encouraging many to flee. But Kaheel and others remained to co-ordinate relief efforts, he told the FT earlier this month.
On Saturday night, Israeli jets struck the city’s centuries-old market district, destroying several historic buildings and caking the main commercial artery in mounds of debris.
In addition to targeting Hizbollah, Israeli air strikes have killed rescue workers affiliated to Amal in recent weeks. When asked by the FT to comment on those strikes, Israel’s military called Amal “a terrorist organisation” that deliberately attacked Israeli men, women and children.
Hours earlier, Israeli jets also struck Beirut’s southern suburbs after a lull of several days, despite Washington saying it opposed the scope of Israel’s air strikes on the capital and Mikati saying he had been given “a kind of guarantee” by the US that the pressure on Beirut would be reduced.
“When it comes to the scope and nature of the bombing campaign that we saw in Beirut over the past few weeks, it’s something that we made clear to the government of Israel we had concerns with and we were opposed to,” US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.