Live Updates: Scores Are Killed in Israeli Strikes in Southern Lebanon, Officials Say

The Israeli strikes on Monday were preceded by what Lebanese authorities called “a large number” of automated messages sent to residents of Beirut, the capital, and other regions warning them to evacuate areas where Hezbollah had hidden weapons. The Israeli military published a map showing 19 villages and towns in southern Lebanon but did not say which, if any, would be targeted.

Ziad Makary, the Lebanese information minister, whose office received an evacuation message, called them a form of “psychological warfare” by Israel.

The strikes were Israel’s latest attempt to break Hezbollah, following clandestine operations last week that blew up the militia’s wireless devices, killing 37 people and wounding thousands, as well as a rare strike on Beirut on Friday that destroyed a building where senior Hezbollah commanders were meeting.

But the surging attacks on Monday reflected Israel’s failure to force Hezbollah to back down, at least for the time being. Hezbollah enacted its own escalation over the weekend, firing a barrage of missiles on Sunday morning that hit areas roughly 30 miles south of the Lebanese border with Israel, its deepest strikes since the start of the war last October.

Here’s what else to know:

• Israel’s gamble: Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week, they would unnerve the group and convince it to pull farther back from the Israel-Lebanon border. For now, the opposite has happened: Hezbollah leaders have said they will continue their attacks until a cease-fire is agreed to in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the militia’s ally.

• Evacuation warnings: Israeli officials said that Hezbollah was storing thousands of long-range rockets in civilian homes, and people in Lebanon received text messages and automated calls warning them to move away from the group’s weapons caches. The claims drew criticism from human rights groups, which argued that Lebanese civilians would have no reasonable means of knowing how close they were to potential military targets.

• Israel hunkers down: Schools remained shuttered in many parts of northern Israel, including in major cities like Haifa and Nahariya, as communities braced for repeated rocket fire from Lebanon. The Israeli military ordered wide-ranging restrictions on gatherings across the area over the weekend, saying only businesses close enough to fortified shelters were permitted to open.

• A week of escalation: Exploding pagers, a major Israeli strike in Beirut and Hezbollah attacks deep inside Israel have brought the two sides closer than they’ve been in years to a full-scale war. In 2006, the two sides fought a devastating 34-day conflict — including an Israeli ground invasion — that killed over 1,000 Lebanese and 150 Israelis.

• Months of attacks: Hezbollah began firing at Israeli troops shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, attempting to show support for its Palestinian ally. Israel responded with missiles and artillery fire, leading to regular exchanges of missiles and rockets, the evacuation of roughly 150,000 people on both sides of the border and widespread damage in the border areas.

Euan Ward, Christina Goldbaum and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

Hussein Awada, 54, who lives just south of Beirut, said that a friend had evacuated with his family from the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh, but that he had lost contact with him.

“I have been trying to reach him by phone but there is no way to connect,” said Mr. Awada. “He said it was very hard. The roads are filled with traffic.”

Israeli officials said on Monday that Hezbollah was storing thousands of long-range rockets in civilian homes, and people in Lebanon received text messages and automated calls warning them to move away from the group’s weapons caches.

The claims drew criticism from international human rights groups, which said residents would have no reasonable means of knowing how close they were to potential military targets.

“Civilians can’t be reasonably expected to know where military objectives are in order to evacuate from those areas,” said Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon-based researcher at Human Rights Watch, adding that both Israel and Hezbollah had an obligation to not place military assets in civilian areas.

The Israeli military was obligated to give enough prior warning of its attacks in order to allow civilians time to flee, Mr. Klaiss said. On Monday, Israeli strikes began within hours of the evacuation warnings.

Even after the warnings, Mr. Klaiss added, Israeli still had an obligation to distinguish between civilian and military targets in its strikes.

Israel’s claim and its warnings on Monday drew stark parallels to Gaza, where for nearly a year civilians have been repeatedly displaced as the Israeli military ordered them to move to areas it said would be safer. On several occasions, the Israeli military has subsequently struck even those areas, saying that Palestinian militants were operating from there.

Mohanad Hage Ali, a Beirut-based fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Israel was adopting a “Gaza-like approach in southern Lebanon,” and he called the evacuation warnings “absurd” because Lebanese civilians would have no idea where Hezbollah’s arsenals were stored.

Mr. Hage Ali said it remained to be seen how much missile power and launching capabilities Hezbollah still had after a week of escalating Israeli attacks. “We will surely learn of that in the next hours,” he said.

Hagari accused Hezbollah of hiding weapons inside civilian structures in Lebanon. He screened video that he said showed an Israeli airstrike on a structure in a Lebanese village that set off secondary explosions, indicating the presence of munitions. The video could not be independently verified.

Amid the wave of Israeli strikes, Hezbollah said that it had responded by striking a series of military targets in the north of Israel.

Israeli officials had hoped that by scaling up their attacks over the past week — striking Hezbollah’s communications tools, and killing several key commanders as well as Lebanese civilians — they would unnerve the group and persuade it to withdraw from the Israel-Lebanon border. The officials believed that if they increased the cost of Hezbollah’s campaign, it would be easier for foreign diplomats, like Amos Hochstein, a senior United States envoy, to get the group to stand down.

For now, the opposite has happened. Despite days of escalatory attacks from Israel, Hezbollah has pledged not to buckle under the pressure.

The group’s leaders have said they will continue their attacks until a Gaza cease-fire is agreed to by Israel and Hamas, the militia’s ally. And on Sunday morning, Hezbollah fired dozens of missiles at targets roughly 30 miles inside Israel, its deepest strikes since the start of the war in October — which one of its top officials warned was “just the beginning.”

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, has even dared Israel to invade southern Lebanon, a move that could just as plausibly lead to a protracted stalemate as an Israeli victory.

An invasion did not appear to be imminent on Monday, even as Israel intensified its strikes and warned civilians to evacuate villages where it said Hezbollah was storing weapons. Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the current focus was on an aerial campaign, not a ground operation.

But if Israel runs short of other forms of military pressure, an invasion would be one of the few military options left to the country’s leadership.

The Israeli Army, though, is already stretched thin — still fighting in Gaza while also stepping up operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where it mounts regular raids on Palestinian cities.

Military analysts have debated the feasibility of Israel’s attempting to fight three land conflicts at once, especially given the challenges posed by an invasion of Lebanon.

After 11 months of fighting, Israel’s military still has not fully defeated Hamas in Gaza. And Hezbollah controls a larger and more mountainous area than Hamas does in Gaza. The Lebanese militia also is generally considered to have a better trained army than Hamas has, in addition to more sophisticated fortifications.

To invade Lebanon, the Israeli military would most likely need to call up thousands of reservists — many of whom are already fatigued from serving in Gaza during the past year.

The health ministry reported Israeli strikes as far north as Hermel in northeastern Lebanon, more than 80 miles from the Israeli border.

But there are also cities, like Tyre and Nabatieh, in southern Lebanon that are home to hundreds of thousands of civilians — most of whom have not fled their homes.

Hagari’s comments are being carried live on television in Israel. He said they are being translated into Arabic in order to alert people in southern Lebanon.

Asked about rising tensions in the Middle East, President Biden told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that he was worried, but that “we’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out.”

“We’re still pushing hard,” he said.

The European Union also said it was “extremely concerned” by the latest cross-border attacks and by Israel’s strike in Beirut on Friday, which Lebanese authorities said killed at least 45 people, including three children.

“Civilians on both sides are paying a high price,” the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said in a statement on Sunday.

Civilians would suffer “the most in a full-blown war,” he added, saying that “intense diplomatic mediation efforts” to prevent such a war would be an E.U. priority during the U.N. General Assembly’s annual summit meeting, set to begin next week in New York.

British and American officials acknowledged that the situation was deteriorating and renewed calls for diplomacy.

John Kirby, President Biden’s national security spokesman, said earlier on Sunday that Mr. Biden remained committed to a diplomatic solution in the Middle East, but conceded that “tensions are much higher now than they were even just a few days ago.”

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Mr. Kirby said the White House had told Israeli officials that escalating the conflict with Hezbollah was not “in their best interest.”

And in Britain, during the Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool in Sunday, the British foreign secretary, David Lammy, called for an “immediate cease-fire,” saying that escalation between Israel and Hezbollah was “in nobody’s interest.”

“Our message to all parties is clear: We need an immediate cease-fire from both sides so that we can get to a political settlement,” Mr. Lammy said. He also repeated the guidance the British government has been issuing to its nationals in Lebanon for months: “For your own safety, leave now.”

Roughly 45,000 people live in Kiryat Bialik, a community with tangerine trees heavy with fruit in the northern suburbs of Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. Residents there were feeling vulnerable even before Sunday’s strike as the back-and-forth attacks escalated recently between Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli military.

But after Friday’s airstrike by Israel in southern Beirut, which killed several senior Hezbollah commanders, it seemed only a matter of time before their town was struck, said several people.

“I had a bad feeling that the next step would be rocket fire deeper than what we have seen up until now,” said Yana Klibaner, 40, a tourism adviser, who lives on the street where the missile hit.

Ms. Klibaner lay in bed in the early hours of Sunday morning, listening as explosions came closer. She finally got up “just before the sirens sounded,” she said, and scooped up her two younger children and ran with her older daughter to the bomb shelter in their house.

“Glass shattered all around us and we felt the blast coming from the street,” she said.

Because of the warning sirens, most residents managed to reach underground shelters or safe rooms and only three people required hospital treatment, according to a spokesman for Rambam Hospital in Haifa.

For some residents the attack was a worrying reminder of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel in which Haifa and its suburbs were targeted. During that conflict, 43 civilians in Israel were killed by Hezbollah rocket fire, according to a report by Human Rights Watch based on information from the Israeli police. Thirteen were killed in Haifa alone, and more than 250 people were wounded there.

In Lebanon, more than 1,100 civilians were killed and thousands more wounded by Israeli attacks during the conflict, according to a separate report from Human Rights Watch.

In Kiryat Bialik on Sunday, there was a sense of foreboding but also resignation about the possibility of more strikes.

Some residents, like Ms. Klibaner, the tourism adviser, sounded critical of the government’s approach. “I feel Israel is dragging this out instead of giving its citizens hope and bringing the hostages back,” she said.

But others, like Malka Barabi, a kindergarten teacher from Kiryat Motzkin, said, “It is time that Israel acts with more power now and the government will have more support from the public because of the ongoing suffering in the northern area, and because living in this condition has become impossible.”

Dahiya’s streets, usually bustling on a weekend, were eerily empty. Shops were closed, their doors locked behind metal gates, and the few cafes open were mostly empty.

“I have been to 15 funerals this week,” said a 50-year-old woman as she stood outside another funeral early Sunday afternoon for two young men killed in the airstrike on Friday. “We’ve been waiting for this moment, we’ve been waiting for this war,” she added, declining to give her name for fear of reprisal.

Like many other residents in the neighborhood, her tone was defiant — an echo of the image of strength that Hezbollah has sought to project in the wake of the attacks by Israel this week.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, many residents were glued to their phones and televisions, waiting for news of additional Israeli airstrikes — and hoping to hear that Hezbollah had retaliated.

Hawra’a Hijazi, 49, said she nearly ran into the street to celebrate when news began to trickle in that Hezbollah had launched a barrage of rockets, missiles and drones into Israeli territory overnight.

“I couldn’t sleep, I could sense the retaliation was coming,” she said.

Simmering beneath that public confidence, there was also a sense of dread — the grim realities and routines of war known all too well to residents. Some were quietly debating how to prepare: Should they remain in Dahiya? Go stay with relatives in a different part of Beirut? Leave the city entirely for second homes in the northern mountains?

Addressing the funeral of the two Hezbollah commanders, the group’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said that “what happened last night is just the beginning,” referring to the overnight barrage launched at Israel. He also warned that the conflict had entered a “new stage.”

“We will kill them and fight them from where they expect and from where they do not expect,” he said, his voice echoing through loudspeakers to the thousands of people gathered.

Mr. Qaseem’s speech — in an area of Dahiya that was devastated by Israeli bombardment during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel and holds symbolic significance for its residents — seemed to make the prospect of an escalation in the hostilities all the more real. But it also tapped into an undercurrent of anger in the neighborhood, where hundreds if not thousands of people were injured in the explosions over the past week.

“We want more retaliation,” said Fatima Karaki, 26. “The way they are killing our leaders, we want the resistance to kill their leaders.”

Around her, women nodded in agreement, many proudly wearing pins with the faces of relatives who had been killed in various conflicts in Lebanon and Syria over the past two decades.

“We are ready for that, we are ready for war,” she added.

But the rocket attacks by the Lebanese militia group also seemed to be carefully calibrated — a show of force near one of Israel’s biggest cities, but one that avoided the more populated center of the country that could draw a harsher response from Israel.

An Israeli security expert said that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was keen to escalate attacks on Israel without pulling the Israeli military into a full-scale war.

“He’s trying to maneuver between two conflicting needs: staying out of a total war and responding to the very successful attacks in Lebanon,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general in Israel’s military and the former head of Israel’s National Security Council.

Last week, Hezbollah suffered a major setback when pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded, killing dozens and injuring thousands, including militants and civilians. While Israel is widely believed to be behind the explosions, it has not explicitly taken responsibility for them.

On Friday, Israel delivered yet another blow to Hezbollah, killing senior commanders in the group in airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut.

General Eiland said that Mr. Nasrallah was calibrating Hezbollah’s response because he did not want Beirut to end up looking like the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by the nearly yearlong war there.

“He understands very well that full destruction of the Lebanese capital isn’t something he’ll be able to explain to the Lebanese people,” he said.

For the past year, both sides have engaged in tit-for-tat attacks across the border, and following Hezbollah’s fusillade of rockets early Sunday, Israel’s military said it carried out strikes against the group in Lebanon.

Israel’s military said that most of the missiles fired overnight were intercepted by air defenses. Still, the rocket salvos on Sunday caused some damage. One hit a residential neighborhood in the town of Kiryat Bialik, a short drive from the Haifa Port. Three people were wounded by shrapnel, emergency services said, and homes and cars sustained damage. Another landed in a dairy farm, killing several cows, according to local officials.