BEIRUT: An Israeli strike on a main highway in southern Lebanon killed one person Monday, the Lebanese health ministry said, as Israel intensifies attacks on its northern neighbor.
Over the weekend, strikes killed five other people, with Israel accusing its Iran-backed foe Hezbollah of rearming.
“An Israeli strike on a car in the area of Baissariyeh killed one person,” the health ministry said Monday.
An AFP journalist saw a bombed out car on the road linking the cities of Sidon and Tyre, with traffic piling up as rescuers worked to retrieve the remains.
Despite a ceasefire in place since November 2024, Israel has kept up attacks on Lebanon, where it continues to hold five positions.
The European Union on Saturday joined a growing chorus of condemnation of Israel’s intensified strikes, urging “to cease all actions that violate... the ceasefire agreement reached a year ago.”
It came after Lebanese President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of rebuffing its overtures for diplomacy.
Israeli strike kills one in south Lebanon: health ministry
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Israeli strike kills one in south Lebanon: health ministry
- An Israeli strike on a main highway in southern Lebanon killed one person Monday, the Lebanese health ministry said, as Israel intensifies attacks on its northern neighbor
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
