Mayor among 16 Killed in Israeli Strike on South Lebanon Municipality Building

A view of a damaged site after an Israeli strike in Nabatieh, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 16, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of a damaged site after an Israeli strike in Nabatieh, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 16, 2024. (Reuters)
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Mayor among 16 Killed in Israeli Strike on South Lebanon Municipality Building

A view of a damaged site after an Israeli strike in Nabatieh, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 16, 2024. (Reuters)
A view of a damaged site after an Israeli strike in Nabatieh, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, southern Lebanon October 16, 2024. (Reuters)

An Israeli airstrike destroyed the municipal headquarters in a major town in south Lebanon on Wednesday, killing 16 people including the mayor, in the biggest attack on an official Lebanese state building since the Israeli air campaign began.

Lebanese officials denounced the attack, which also wounded more than 50 people in Nabatieh, a provincial capital, saying it was proof that Israel's campaign against the Hezbollah armed group was now shifting to target the Lebanese state.

The Israelis "intentionally targeted a meeting of the municipal council to discuss the city's service and relief situation" to aid people displaced by the Israeli campaign, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, on a visit to northern Israel near the border, said Israel would not halt its assault on Hezbollah to allow negotiations.

"Hezbollah is in great distress," he said according to a statement from his office. "We will hold negotiations only under fire. I said this on day one, I said it in Gaza and I am saying it here."

Israel launched its ground and air campaign in Lebanon to dismantle Hezbollah after a year during which the Iran-backed armed group fired across the border in support of the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza.

In recent weeks Israel has assassinated Hezbollah's senior leadership and pushed into southern border towns, saying its aim is to make it safe for tens of thousands of Israelis to return to homes in Israel's north evacuated under Hezbollah fire.

Israel first issued an evacuation notice for Nabatieh, a city of tens of thousands of people, on Oct. 3. At the time, the city's Mayor Ahmed Kahil told Reuters he would not leave.

Israel's military said on Wednesday it struck dozens of Hezbollah targets in the Nabatieh area and its navy also hit dozens of targets in southern Lebanon.

It said it had "dismantled" a tunnel network used by Hezbollah's elite Radwan Forces in the heart of a town near the border with Israel, publishing a video showing multiple explosions rocking a cluster of buildings. Lebanese officials said it was the small town of Mhaibib.

STRIKES RESUME ON SOUTHERN BEIRUT SUBURBS

Earlier on Wednesday, Israeli warplanes hit Beirut's southern suburbs for the first time in nearly a week.

Reuters heard two blasts and saw plumes of smoke rising from two separate neighborhoods. The blasts came after Israel issued an evacuation order which mentioned only one building.

The Israeli military said it had targeted an underground Hezbollah weapons stockpile.

"Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including advancing warnings to the population in the area," the Israeli military said. Hezbollah did not immediately comment.

It was the first attack on Beirut since Oct. 10, when two strikes near the city center killed 22 people and brought down entire buildings in a densely populated neighborhood.

Israel has called on the United Nations to move members of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon out of the combat zone for their safety. UNIFIL says its troops have come under Israeli attack several times, though Israel has disputed accounts of those incidents.

The 10,000-strong peacekeeper force comprises contingents from 50 countries, including 2,500 Italian, French and Spanish soldiers, causing strain between Israel and some of its most prominent European allies.

Having long accused UNIFIL of failing in its mission to keep armed fighters out of the border area, Israel adopted a more conciliatory tone on Wednesday.

"The State of Israel places great importance on the activities of UNIFIL and has no intention of harming the organization or its personnel," Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.

"Furthermore, Israel views UNIFIL as playing an important role in the 'day after' following the war against Hezbollah."

EU countries contributing to the peacekeeping mission held a conference call, and concluded that the mission is "essential and fundamental" and that only the UN can decide whether to end it, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said.

On Tuesday, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Washington had expressed its concerns to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's administration over recent attacks on Beirut.

France has banned Israeli firms from participating in an upcoming military naval trade show, two sources aware of the matter said on Wednesday, the latest incident to highlight an increasingly tense relationship between the two allies.

Israeli operations in Lebanon have killed at least 2,350 people over the last year, according to the health ministry, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced. The UN says a quarter of the country is under evacuation orders. The toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but includes hundreds of women and children.

Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the same period, according to Israel.

Lebanon's Mikati appeared to cast doubt on diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire.

"What can deter the enemy (Israel) from its crimes, which have reached the point of targeting peacekeeping forces in the south? And what solution is hoped for in light of this reality?" he said in a written statement.



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.