Concerns grow as Israel attacks new areas of Lebanon

Rescue workers had just left when we arrived at the scene of an Israeli air strike on a building in Aramoun, southwest of the Lebanese capital Beirut.

It should have been cleared. They found eight bodies – including three children and three women – and took many injured people to the hospital; some are in critical condition.

Then some men on the balcony of the opposite building started shouting: “One hand, one hand. We can see a hand.”

They were pointing at the balcony on the second floor, which had been completely destroyed and had fallen to the collapsed floor below.

A young man climbed onto the rubble. He arrived, moved some rubble, then held up something that couldn’t be remotely identified.

Then I asked him if he had found the hand. He replied: “No. That’s not a hand. It was a piece of bone from the head.”

The multi-story building hit by the bomb was located in a residential area.

We learned that most of the people there were internally displaced, mainly from the south of the country or the southern suburbs of Beirut.

These are areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence and are frequently targeted by Israel in its war with the Iran-backed political and military group.

Aramoun is a religiously mixed area and until Wednesday it was considered safe because it had not been attacked before.

The dawn attack came without warning.

“It was about 4 am. We slept. We woke up to a very loud noise. At first we couldn’t see anything because the smoke was everywhere,” said a mother of two who lives in the opposite building.

She sought refuge in her uncle’s house in Aramoun after Israel began bombing Beirut’s southern suburbs.

“Israel is attacking everywhere. There is no safe place anymore,” she added.

Another woman in her 80s was being loaded into a car.

She moved to Aramoun a month ago, also from the southern suburbs of Beirut.

After the strike, she left with everyone in the building and spent two or three hours in their car on the street.

When we saw her, she was gathering some of her possessions. She told us she was scared and had to move again.

This time, she said, she would go to her son. He was also displaced.

When asked about the prospect of an early cessation of hostilities, she replied: “The more they talk about a ceasefire, the more Israel increases its attacks.”

The Israeli military has not yet said who or what it is targeting in Aramoun.

But the strike has similarities with some other places in the country: it is carried out without warning against residential buildings or houses with displaced people. The Israeli military said many of those attacks targeted Hezbollah infrastructure.

The attacks are causing growing social unrest in host communities, as residents express concern about the possibility of Israel targeting displaced people living with them or others visiting, usually to provide financial support.

“We all love resistance [Hezbollah]But if someone has a son and it’s not even sure if he belongs to Hezbollah or someone comes to the aid of displaced people and they are being targeted, we are paying the price,” a man owned said houses in the area. was beaten and lived there with his wife and children.

“The evacuees come as guests and we welcome them,” he added. But if there’s someone strange here, whoever he is – it could be my own son and I don’t know he belongs to Hezbollah – and they target him, and children and women are killed, that Is that pitiful?

Such comments have become more common following a series of recent Israeli attacks in various parts of the country outside of known war zones.

But at the same time, there are growing calls for national unity in Lebanon as well as warnings that such attacks from Israel could be deliberately designed to create such social instability.