Israeli airstrikes kill 11 in southern Lebanon, worst toll since June ceasefire

Early Saturday morning, rescue workers picked through rubble in the southern Lebanese village of Ansar, searching for survivors and bodies. An Israeli warplane had struck a home on the village's outskirts, collapsing the building and killing seven people. Hours later, another airstrike hit the nearby town of Deir al-Zahrani, destroying a second home and killing two more. By day's end, eleven people were dead—three of them children—and nineteen others wounded. It was the deadliest toll since June, when a ceasefire had quieted the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

The strikes shattered what had been, for two months, a fragile calm. In March, Hezbollah had fired rockets into Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader. Israel responded with an aerial campaign and ground invasion that killed more than 4,300 people and occupied roughly six percent of Lebanese territory. By June, a US-Iran memorandum and a subsequent US-sponsored framework deal between Lebanon and Israel had brought most of the fighting to a halt. But the ceasefire was never absolute. Israeli forces remained in southern Lebanon, and occasional strikes continued, though nothing on this scale.

The Israeli military said it had targeted what it called Hezbollah infrastructure in the Ansar and Nabatieh area in response to fighters attacking soldiers in the Ali Taher region, a hill where Israel says large underground Hezbollah command centers are located. The military spokesperson, Ella Waweya, framed the operation as a defensive measure. But neither Ansar nor Deir al-Zahrani lay within Israel's self-declared security zone—a 231-square-mile area under Israeli military control. The strikes, in other words, reached beyond the territory Israel had claimed it needed to hold.

The aftermath was chaos. Roads out of Nabatieh and surrounding villages clogged with traffic as residents fled north, unsure whether the attacks signaled a return to full-scale war or whether it was safe to remain in their homes. One drone also targeted a motorcycle in Nabatieh, though it remained unclear whether the driver was killed. The news agency NNA reported that the valley between Ansar and Zarariyeh had been struck—the first strike at that geographical depth since the ceasefire two months earlier. Israeli forces also detonated homes in the town of Bint Jbeil near the border.

Lebanon's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam condemned the attacks as extremely dangerous and said they undermined efforts to establish stability in the south. He called on Israel to stop the escalation. "The seven martyrs of the Israeli strike on the town of Ansar were not military infrastructure and the children and women killed were not military targets," he said. Hezbollah issued a statement condemning the strikes and vowing a response. "The Israeli enemy must clearly understand that its attacks, violations and attempts to impose a fait accompli cannot continue, and will be met with an appropriate response in defence of Lebanon," the group's media relations department said.

The framework deal signed in June was supposed to chart a path toward stability: Hezbollah would be disarmed, Israeli forces would gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese army would deploy to the region in pilot zones. But the agreement has faced strain almost from the beginning. On Friday, Hezbollah's chief, Naim Qassem, accused Lebanese authorities of subjecting the country's armed forces to undue pressure by implementing the deal, asking how the Lebanese army could be expected to deploy while facing bombardment and Israeli pressure. The latest strikes seemed to vindicate his skepticism.

The question now hanging over southern Lebanon is whether Saturday's attacks represent a temporary breach or a return to the broader conflict. Residents who had begun to rebuild and return to their homes faced an immediate choice: stay and risk further strikes, or join the exodus northward. Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, urged the UN to maintain an international peacekeeping force in Lebanon after the current mandate expires later this year, arguing that peacekeepers serve as a crucial deterrent against attacks on civilians. The ceasefire, it seemed, was being tested—and the outcome remained uncertain.