Israel has carried out at least four air strikes on the historic Lebanese port city of Tyre, hours after expanding its evacuation orders to cover several central neighbourhoods, Lebanon’s state news agency says.
Videos showed huge clouds of black smoke rising from a seafront area that is only a few hundred metres from a Unesco World Heritage-listed Roman ruins. There were no immediate reports of any casualties.
The Israeli military earlier warned civilians to leave, saying it was going to act “forcefully” against the armed group Hezbollah there.
Tens of thousands of residents had already fled the city in recent weeks in response to Israel’s intense air campaign and ground invasion.
But before the strikes began a spokesman for a disaster management unit said about 14,000 people were still living in the city, including those displaced from elsewhere in the south.
“You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated,” Bilal Kashmar told AFP news agency, adding that many people were heading towards the suburbs.
Overnight, Lebanese media reported that Israeli aircraft carried out multiple strikes on the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley – all areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
The Israeli military said the strikes in Beirut targeted weapons storage and manufacturing facilities, as well as command centres belonging to Hezbollah.
The military also said it had killed the Hezbollah sector commanders for the southern areas of Jibchit, Jouaiya, and Qana in air strikes over the past several days, and that its troops had killed about 70 Hezbollah fighters during operations inside southern Lebanon to dismantle the group’s infrastructure and weapons caches.
There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah.
Credit: bbc.com
