Rocket fire from Lebanon kills 7 in Israel as US officials try to push for ceasefire

Displaced children, who fled the city of Baalbek and the nearby towns of Douris and Ain Bourday with their families during the Hezbollah-Israel war, learn inside a school that is being used as a shelter in Deir Al-Ahmar, east Lebanon, on Thursday. October 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Lebanon’s rocket barrage into northern Israel killed four foreign workers and three Israelis Thursday, Israeli medics said, in Israel’s deadliest cross-border strikes since it invaded Lebanon. Israel continued airstrikes it said targeted Hezbollah militants across Lebanon, where health authorities reported 24 people killed on Thursday. US diplomats were in the region pushing for cease-fires in both Lebanon and Gaza, hoping to end the wars in the Middle East as the Biden administration enters its final months. Pressure has mounted ahead of next week’s US election. In northern Gaza, Israeli forces struck one of the last functioning hospitals, according to the World Health Organization, destroying much-needed supplies the UN agency had delivered to the facility. The strikes started a fire that damaged the dialysis unit, destroyed water tanks, damaged the office building and injured four doctors who were trying to put out the fire, said the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on a strike on the hospital, which it took last week after it said it was harboring Hamas militants. Gaza’s Ministry of Health condemned the Israeli attacks on the hospital on Thursday and called on the international community to protect medical facilities in Gaza.
Back-to-back deadly rocket attacks hit Israel
Projects in Lebanon collapsed in an agricultural area in Metula, Israel’s northernmost city, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer, local officials said Thursday. Hours later, the Israeli military reported another salvo of about 25 rockets from Lebanon, hitting an olive grove in a suburb of the northern Israeli port city of Haifa. That strike killed a 30-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman while injuring two others, said Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are supported by Iran, Israel’s regional rival. Hezbollah did not immediately claim responsibility for Thursday’s rocket fire. The Israeli military said on Thursday that 90 projectiles had been fired from Lebanon. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets, drones and rockets into Israel — and drawn fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes — over the past year since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in the Gaza Strip sparked Israel’s devastating war in the Palestinian enclave. The residents of Metula were evacuated in October 2023, and only security officials and agricultural workers remained. The Refugee and Migrant Hotline, an Israeli organization that advocates for foreign workers, said authorities had put them at risk by allowing them to work along the border without adequate protection. The agricultural areas near Israel’s border are closed military zones that can only be entered with official permission. For the few remaining residents, the sound of interceptions by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and screeching air raid sirens punctuate daily life. However, local officials are largely supportive of continuing a ground operation in southern Lebanon.
“If the Israeli government agrees to an agreement brought by (the Biden administration) … we will not have it, because for us it means the rehabilitation of Hezbollah on our borders,” said Eitan Davidi, mayor of the northern town of Margaliot.
Israeli bombs in Lebanon after evacuation warnings
Israeli strikes killed 24 people in Lebanon on Thursday, including 13 in the country’s eastern Bekaa Valley, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News agency, a day after the Israeli military warned residents there to evacuate. The warnings sent thousands fleeing and spread panic in the city, known for its colossal Roman ruins. The Lebanese Ministry of Health reported that over the past 24 hours, Israeli shelling had killed 45 people and wounded 110 in different parts of the country. Jean Fakhry, a local official in the Bekaa Valley’s Deir al-Ahmar region, said Israeli airstrikes hitting the area had turned the main highway. “a parking lot” of fleeing cars stuck in traffic. About 12,000 displaced people remain in the area, he said, most taking refuge in private homes. At one of the shelters in Deir al-Ahmar, families with luggage were still arriving on Thursday.
“Our homes were destroyed” said Zahraa Younis, from the village near Baalbek. “We came with nothing—no clothes or anything.”
US officials are in the region seeking a ceasefire
Senior White House aides Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein were in Israel on Thursday for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials about the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. The meetings focused on efforts to secure a cease-fire agreement in Lebanon and evaluate new proposals presented by mediators for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, according to a US official familiar with the planning of the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity , as they were not authorized to comment publicly. The meetings were attended by Netanyahu, as well as Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Minister of Defense; David Barnea, director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency; and other officials. But with the US election on Tuesday, hopes of immediate progress looked remote – particularly in Gaza, where Israel has been criticized for not allowing more humanitarian aid into the besieged north. The death toll from more than a year of war in Gaza topped 43,000 earlier this week, Palestinian health officials reported. Awda Hospital in central Gaza said late Thursday that it had received 16 bodies of people killed in Israeli shelling of two houses in the Nuseirat refugee camp. The hospital said more than 30 others, including a doctor and two journalists, were injured. Over the past year, Israel’s campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah has killed 2,865 people, wounded more than 13,000 and devastated Lebanese towns near the border. About 1.2 million people in Lebanon have been displaced since Israel escalated the conflict into full-scale war last month, when it launched a wave of heavy airstrikes that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most his deputies. A year of Hezbollah rocket attacks also forced 60,000 Israelis to evacuate from near the border.