Israel gave residents an hour to evacuate areas in southern Lebanon after announcing planned attacks on Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has denounced Israel’s air strikes on three towns in the south of the country, as the latter again flouted its truce with Hezbollah.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported on Thursday that the Israeli army carried out several strikes on the densely populated towns of Meiss el-Jabal, Kfar Tebnit and Debbin, which were carried out just one hour after announcing plans to target Hezbollah infrastructure.
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Salam accused Israel of “intimidation and aggressions” committed in defiance of last year’s ceasefire and the internationally backed mechanism to monitor it.
“Lebanon calls on the international community, especially the countries sponsoring the agreement to cease hostile operations, to exert maximum pressure on Israel to immediately stop its aggressions,” said Salam in a post on social media.
France and the United States are the main sponsors of the deal.
Earlier, the Israeli military had announced the planned attacks on Hezbollah “military infrastructure” and called on residents to evacuate buildings marked in red on an attached map.
Spokesman Avichay Adraee said that the attacks were being carried out in response to Hezbollah’s “prohibited attempts to rebuild its activities in the region”.
Reporting from Lebanon’s capital Beirut, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said the Israeli army’s warning had prompted mass evacuations.
“We saw people pack whatever they could and make their way to safer areas,” she said.
The attacks, she said, came “approximately an hour” after the evacuation order.
Hezbollah weakened
Hezbollah and Israeli forces exchanged near-daily fire across the Lebanese border after the onset of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Despite a ceasefire brokered in November 2024, Israel has continued to strike southern Lebanon on an almost daily basis.
“They target vehicles, motorcycles – they target what they call Hezbollah members and assets,” said Al Jazeera’s Khodr.
Under the terms of the deal, Hezbollah is supposed to disarm and move north of the Litani River, while Israel is supposed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory.
However, it still remains, occupying at least five points in southern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Lebanon is under pressure, primarily from the United States, to disarm Hezbollah by the end of the year.
The group’s arms have long been a contentious issue in Lebanon, with attempts to interfere with its military capabilities leading to internal conflict.
However, Hezbollah has suffered major losses since last year, including the loss of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed by an Israeli strike in the Beirut suburbs almost exactly a year ago.
Thursday’s strikes happened just after Hezbollah marked the one-year anniversary of Israel’s so-called pager attack on its members, which wounded and killed at least a dozen people and left more than 3,000 wounded.
The terms of the ceasefire agreement, which Salam referred to in Thursday’s post, were set by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which was adopted at the end of the 2006 war to stop hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Women hold posters during a march to commemorate the first anniversary of the pager explosions in Beirut, Lebanon, on September 17, 2025 [Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]
