Live Updates: Hezbollah fires on Tel Aviv; Israeli General Hints at Use of Ground Troops
Here are the latest developments.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that it had shot down a Hezbollah missile fired at Tel Aviv, the first time the Iran-backed militia had taken direct aim at the city. It was a reminder that even after a string of Israeli attacks that have killed some of the group’s commanders, Hezbollah can still reach deep into Israel’s urban core.
The foiled missile strike came as the Israeli military called up two brigades of reservists and sent them to the northern border with Lebanon. At the same time, the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, told soldiers already stationed at the border that the intense airstrikes in Lebanon since Monday were intended “to prepare the terrain” for a possible ground incursion.
Hezbollah, the armed group and political party that controls much of southern Lebanon, said the missile it fired toward Tel Aviv, the heart of the country’s densely populated urban core, was intended to hit the headquarters of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. Instead, it caused no damage or injuries.
One of the big questions after a week of Israeli airstrikes aimed at hundreds of targets in Lebanon is how badly Hezbollah has been damaged, how much of its extensive missile arsenal has been destroyed and what capabilities it still has to mount major strikes on Israel. It was also unclear whether the attempted strike in Tel Aviv was a defiant warning to Israel that Hezbollah could launch a bigger attack — or a desperate sign of the limits of its current capacity.
Israel’s attacks continued on Wednesday, with the military saying it struck roughly 280 sites by midafternoon. At least 51 people were killed and 223 wounded in airstrikes since Wednesday morning, Firass Abiad, the Lebanese health minister, told reporters in an afternoon news conference. He did not break down the casualties between civilians and fighters.
Hezbollah also fired dozens of rockets at northern Israel, although Israeli missile defenses intercepted many of them. One rocket struck a private home in Kibbutz Sa’ar, outside the city of Nahariya, spraying shrapnel that injured two men, one of them seriously, rescue workers said.
Here’s what else to know:
-
Israel’s strikes have spread panic and desperation across Lebanon and displaced roughly 500,000 people, according to Lebanon’s foreign ministry. Civilians have clogged the main roads leading to Beirut, while some from the capital have sought safety in the mountains and farther north. The U.N. refugee agency said thousands had fled from Lebanon to Syria in recent days, in a reversal of the decade-long flow of refugees in the opposite direction.
-
Israel at the U.N.: Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to travel to New York on Thursday for the U.N. General Assembly, where the conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza have been high on the agenda. Earlier this week, President Biden called for a cease-fire in Gaza, and U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned: “The world cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.”
-
Intense air raids: In recent days, Israel has unleashed on Lebanon some of the heaviest aerial attacks in the history of modern warfare, outpacing the bombardment of Gaza during the opening days of the Israel-Hamas war last October, war experts said. Strikes on Monday alone killed more than 550 people and injured another 1,800, one of the highest daily death tolls of any recent global war, and Lebanon’s deadliest day since its 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
-
Focus on Gaza: The families of Israeli hostages in Gaza fear their loved ones will be forgotten as Israel’s attention and military resources turn to the escalating conflict in the north. Dozens of the roughly 250 hostages taken by Hamas in its Oct. 7 attacks remain captive in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli authorities have declared that more than 30 hostages are presumed dead in Gaza.
President Biden tried to maintain a note of optimism about the Middle East on Wednesday, but conceded that “an all-out war is possible.” He said on the ABC program The View, “I think there’s still the opportunity — we’re still in play to have a settlement that can fundamentally change the whole region.” Biden said he believed the “Arab world very much wants to have a settlement.”
Lebanon’s growing civilian death toll includes children and rescue workers.
From girl scouts to first aid responders, cleaners to electrical engineers, the names and faces of the Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli airstrikes this week have begun to emerge, as the nation reels from the deadliest day in its history since the 15-year civil war.
Hundreds of people have been killed since Israel began launching airstrikes in Lebanon on Sunday, in what it describes as a campaign targeting the militant group Hezbollah and its weapons stores.
Many Lebanese are still taking stock of those lost on Monday, when Israeli strikes killed 558 people in a single day, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The toll includes 50 children and 94 women.
Among them was Dina Darwiche, an employee of the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. Her body was found along with that of her youngest son after an Israeli missile hit the building where they lived in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region.
Friends wrote tributes to Ms. Darwiche on social media, many of them posting a selfie of her smiling and posing with the son who was killed with her. Others shared a video of a U.N. campaign she ran in previous years against gender-based violence.
“She had been dedicated to her humanitarian work with UNHCR for as long as I can remember,” her friend, Jasmin Diab, posted on the social media platform X. “I am broken. I am absolutely destroyed. I cannot breathe. When will the world let us breathe?!”
Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia and political party with powerful sway over Lebanon, have been locked in near daily cross-border skirmishes since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Hezbollah began launching rockets in a bid to push Israel toward a cease-fire in Hamas-controlled Gaza, where more than 40,000 have been killed.
But the tempo of those sporadic clashes, which forced tens of thousands of Lebanese and Israelis on either side of the border to flee their homes, reached a new level with Israel’s strikes in recent days.
Military experts have called Israel’s latest campaign one of the most intense air raids in modern warfare.
Israeli officials argue that the strikes are not targeting civilians, and they point to evacuation orders for targeted areas as proof. But rights groups counter that Israel doesn’t specify regions to evacuate but warns people to stay away from places where Hezbollah is hiding weapons, an assessment that is difficult to impossible for civilians to assess.
Lebanon’s health ministry does not differentiate between militants and civilians in its casualty counts, making it difficult to gauge how many of those killed have been civilians. On Tuesday, Firass Abiad, the health minister, said that the “vast majority were unarmed people who were safely in their homes.”
“Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon are now relentlessly claiming hundreds of civilian lives,” Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, wrote on X, in a statement mourning the loss of the agency’s two employees.
In addition to Ms. Darwiche, the UNHCR said one of its janitors, Ali Basma, had been killed in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s electricity company said Israeli strikes in the south killed one of its engineers in her home, along with her husband, children, parents and sister.
On Wednesday, employees at Electricity of Lebanon paid tribute to Farah Kajak. “She left an unforgettable mark among all her colleagues and those who worked with her,” they wrote.
Waleed Fayyad, the energy minister, said the strike on her family “reflects the extent of the brutality of the enemy, which does not respect international or humanitarian law.”
The Risala scouts, an Islamic organization that includes youth activities as well as emergency aid services, said three of its members, Ilan Basheer, Nour Touba and Hussein Moussa, were killed in their homes in southern Lebanon.
Four of Risala’s first aid responders were killed as they were working to rescue people this week, the group said.
Mr. Abiad, the minister of health, said 14 ambulances and fire engines had been targeted in Israeli strikes, killing the Risala emergency responders and wounding 16 other medics.
Lebanese media networks have also claimed losses in their ranks. On Monday, Hadi al-Sayed, a journalist with the pro-Hezbollah Mayadeen News network, was killed.
The International Federation of Journalists said Mr. al-Sayed was the fourth journalist killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon since Oct. 7.
“Whether killed deliberately, or as collateral damage, it represents a shocking disregard for human life and the journalistic community in particular,” said Anthony Bellanger, the group’s secretary general.
Since Monday, the number has again risen: On Wednesday, the Hezbollah-affiliated Manar Television said its journalist Kamel Karaki was also killed.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, addressed soldiers in northern Israel, telling them the goal of the airstrikes in Lebanon was, in part, “to prepare the terrain for the possibility of your incursion” into Lebanese territory. He told the troops to prepare to enter Lebanon and to meet a “forceful response,” and reminded them they were battle-hardened and skilled soldiers. “You come much stronger than they are, much more experienced,” he said, adding that “going inside, destroying the enemy there, going sharply to destroy infrastructure – those are the things that will allow us to get the residents of the north back later safely.”
Farnaz Fassihi
Reporting on the United Nations
As the threat of an all-out war looms between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the U.N.’s humanitarian relief agency appealed for $170 million in donations to address the growing crisis there. The U.N. said at least 90,530 newly displaced people had been reported in Lebanon, and at least 40,000 were being housed in 283 shelters.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Jerusalem
At least 51 people have been killed and 223 wounded in Israeli airstrikes across the country since this morning, Firass Abiad, the Lebanese health minister, told reporters.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
The Israeli military said it had attacked roughly 280 targets in Lebanon today, including dozens of military depots and other infrastructure in the area of Nabatieh in the country’s south.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Jerusalem
At least two men were wounded, one severely and one moderately, when a rocket struck a house in a kibbutz in northern Israel, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency service. Both sustained shrapnel wounds and were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment, the service said in a statement.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military announced that it would call up two brigades of reserve soldiers for “operational missions on the northern front,” a reference to the fighting with Hezbollah. Israel’s military leans heavily on its reservists, many of whom already left their families and jobs for tours fighting Hamas in Gaza over the past year.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
Ali Hamieh, Lebanon’s minister of public works, met with officials at Beirut’s airport today in an effort to quell concerns that it might stop operating during the escalating conflict with Israel.“This facility has suffered, and so has the entire Lebanese population,” he said, according to state news media. “Now is not the time to undermine the airport, which is the country’s primary air facility.”
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Jerusalem
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel will travel to New York on Thursday to address the United Nations General Assembly amid the rapidly escalating fighting with Hezbollah. Netanyahu is expected to give his speech on Friday before leaving for Israel on Saturday night.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
Thousands have fled from Lebanon to Syria in recent days, the U.N. refugee agency said on Wednesday in a statement, in a reversal of a decade-long flow of refugees in the opposite direction because of Syria’s civil war. The agency said hundreds of cars and large crowds of people traveling by foot were waiting at the border, with some injured and many sleeping outdoors.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
Hezbollah has launched dozens of rockets into northern Israel so far today, the Israeli military said. About 40 entered Israel after sirens sounded in the Upper Galilee, but the country’s missile defense system intercepted many of them. One hit an assisted living facility in Safed, but no injuries were reported.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
The Hostage Families Forum, a group representing people whose loved ones have been held in Gaza since Oct. 7, said in a statement that it feared the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah “may overshadow the plight of our 101 loved ones.” It urged the U.N. General Assembly and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected to travel to New York this week, to focus on the release of the hostages.
Fleeing Israeli airstrikes, Lebanese worry about where to go next.
Ahmed Issa and his family spent 20 hours on the road from southern Lebanon, most of it stuck sweating in bumper-to-bumper traffic, before reaching a shelter in Beirut on Tuesday afternoon. Already, he was looking for another place to go.
The shelter itself wasn’t so bad — he was grateful for the warm welcome from the volunteers running it and the water they handed out — but with every plane that flew overhead, to or from the nearby airport, the children panicked. Was it another missile?
“Even the sounds of regular planes freak out the kids,” said Mr. Issa, 33, holding his 3-year-old with one arm and pointing to a passenger jet overhead with the other. “That’s the reason we’re trying to get to another place.”
They had been sitting together on Monday afternoon at their farmhouse in Majidieh, a small village in green, fertile south Lebanon, when an Israeli missile struck close enough to see and hear, he said. They quickly dressed to leave, piled into the taxicab that Mr. Issa drives to make ends meet and joined the masses of cars heading toward Beirut, a journey that would normally take about two hours.
They were just a few of what Lebanon’s foreign minister has said are the half-million Lebanese displaced by Israeli airstrikes. About 400 people had come to this school-turned-shelter in the Bir Hassan neighborhood after it opened on Monday afternoon, and more were still coming through the gate, only to be turned away.
The government has designated 42 buildings as shelters, while other, private shelters have sprung up ad hoc. But after years of political and economic crisis, the country is badly equipped for this latest one and the many thousands of people fleeing to Beirut. Because the government did not provide supplies or staff, it fell to local aid groups, individual donors and volunteers affiliated with political parties to run the shelters and stock them with mattresses, bedding, food, water and medicine.
Mr. Issa’s family, like most of those fleeing, found a place to go through word of mouth and lists of shelters circulating on WhatsApp. All told, 60 members of their extended family had taken shelter in Beirut.
But Mr. Issa’s father stayed behind to take care of the house, cattle and farm, the work of 35 years.
“I’m so worried about my husband, but what can we do?” said Zeinab Awada, 60, Mr. Issa’s mother, who sat on a bench in the same clothes she was wearing when she left home, sat in traffic, slept in the car and trudged into the shelter.
Ms. Awada wiped tears from her eyes with her veil. “We couldn’t bring anything with us,” she said. “We barely managed to get dressed and get in the car and get out of there. We’ve lost everything, and now we’re homeless.”
At the shelter, there was nowhere to shower. They had been given a few thin mattresses to sleep on among the wooden desks in a classroom, and there was bread and water in the courtyard downstairs. Wires once used for hanging student artwork had been repurposed as laundry lines for the displaced.
Young men on motorbikes soon zoomed through the gate, shouting, waving and hauling black garbage bags full of snacks and other donations into the courtyard — not much, but something.
Mr. Issa said he was grateful for the help. But what comforted him more than material support, he said, was knowing that someone — what he called “the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah — was fighting for the south. It wasn’t like in the past, he said, before Hezbollah grew into a force to be reckoned with and “Israel could just march into Lebanon and no one could say anything.”
Now it was different. “Someone is defending you and your land. You’re not just pushed aside,” he said. “I left my village and my house, I left my father there, but I still feel empowered.”
He acknowledged that there was a price for such a defense. His family was homeless, their neighbor in Majidieh perhaps dead. They had not heard from him since Monday, when they said they saw four missiles strike near his house.
Others in Lebanon blamed Hezbollah for bringing such destruction to Lebanon. But Mr. Issa said it was Israel’s aggression that had caused all of this.
“People think we in the south just love death and war and blood. That’s wrong. We love life,” he said. “But at the end of the day, this is the reality forced on all of us.”
Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.
Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Jerusalem
The Israeli military said that it was conducting more airstrikes in the area of Nabatieh, a city in southern Lebanon.
Liam Stack
Reporting from Tel Aviv
Lebanon’s health ministry said three people had been killed and nine others injured in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday on the town of Al-Maaysra, about 25 miles north of Beirut. There were no immediate details about the casualties.
Nader Ibrahim
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows a plume of smoke rising in Al-Maaysra.
Hezbollah takes aim at Tel Aviv for the first time, Israel says.
The Israeli military said it had intercepted a missile that Hezbollah fired at Tel Aviv from Lebanon on Wednesday, in one of the militant group’s most far-reaching attacks into Israeli territory in decades of conflict.
The surface-to-surface missile, which set off alerts in Tel Aviv and the coastal resort of Netanya, was shot down by Israel’s air defense, the military said. Air-raid sirens sent residents fleeing into shelters in the early morning hours. Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization, said it had not received reports of injuries.
Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, said in a statement that it had launched a ballistic missile targeting the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. The group said the attack was in retaliation for the assassination of its leaders and the explosion of pagers and radios that incapacitated many of its members.
A spokesman for the Israeli military, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said the attack marked the first time the group had taken aim at Tel Aviv, Israel’s economic center. The missile had been headed toward civilian areas, rather than the Mossad headquarters, before it was intercepted, he told reporters in a news briefing.
“They’re trying to shoot more and farther in,” he said. “This morning, they were able to shoot farther in, the first time in history to Tel Aviv.”
Those attacks last week targeting Hezbollah leaders were followed by a barrage of Israeli airstrikes against the group in Lebanon since Monday that has killed more than 500 people, according to Lebanese authorities. The attacks have brought the two sides closer to all-out war than at any time since the start of the war in Gaza last October.
The Israeli military said its air force had struck the launcher from which the missile was fired, in the town of Nafakhiyeh in southern Lebanon.
After the Hamas-led attacks last October sparked the war in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing on Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally. In the year since, Israel and Hezbollah have been trading attacks, driving over 160,000 people from their homes near the border in both countries.
But Tel Aviv in central Israel has been largely sheltered from the conflict. As recently as Saturday, families were flocking to beaches and businesses were bustling in the city, 70 miles from the border with Lebanon.
Since Sunday, Hezbollah has launched more than 500 missiles, rockets and drones into Israel, most of which were intercepted. The group has appeared undeterred by the string of attacks by Israel last week.
Hezbollah, which many analysts consider the most powerful of the Iranian proxy groups and the biggest military threat to Israel, has spent years building military capacity since its war with Israel in 2006. The group was estimated to possess between 120,000 and 200,000 rockets and missiles before Israel’s strikes this week.
Israel achieved short-term aims in a week of attacks on Hezbollah, officials say, but the end goal is unclear.
Israel achieved many short-term goals in a series of strikes on Hezbollah during the last week, according to five current and former senior Israeli officials. But they also expressed concern that there was no clear further strategy on bringing calm and returning tens of thousands of displaced people back to Israel’s north.
The escalations against Hezbollah began almost by chance after last-minute Israeli intelligence suggested that an operation to blow up pagers owned by members of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia was in danger of being exposed, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. If the plan was not activated by the beginning of last week, the officials said, Hezbollah might discover it, possibly along with a second operation targeting walkie-talkies.
That set up a dizzying week of attacks in Lebanon. Israel blew up electronic devices distributed by Hezbollah, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more. It then assassinated a group of its military leaders in an airstrike near Beirut. On Monday, a wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting parts of the country where Hezbollah holds sway killed hundreds of people.
The intensified attacks against Hezbollah reflect the opinion of some hawkish generals and others who think that the group can be forced to back down, the officials said, while others in the government believe Israel must first come to a deal on a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas before turning to another battleground. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed a truce that would allow Hamas to survive the war.
The decision to escalate was met with strong opposition from some senior officials, according to three current and former officials who spoke to The Times. They worried that such actions, the officials said, could lead to all-out war with face-to-face fighting and questioned how they would pave the way for the return of Israelis to the north.
Hezbollah has been targeting northern Israel with rockets and drones since last year in solidarity with Hamas and its war against Israel in Gaza. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, has said the group will not agree to stop firing at Israel until Israel and Hamas reach an agreement that ends the war in Gaza.
Israel says it killed another top leader of Hezbollah, the latest blow in a concerted campaign.
The Israeli military said Tuesday that it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander in an airstrike in Beirut, the latest blow in what appears to be a concerted Israeli attempt to take out the group’s leadership.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, identified the target as Ibrahim Mohammed Qobeisi, a senior Hezbollah commander who oversaw Hezbollah’s missile apparatus. Hezbollah later confirmed that Mr. Qobeisi had been killed. The group provided no details on his role, but referred to him by an honorific title reserved only for Hezbollah’s senior members.
The Israeli military says that Mr. Qobeisi planned the abduction of three Israeli soldiers in 2000; their bodies were later returned to Israel in a prisoner exchange.
Israel has stepped up efforts to assassinate Hezbollah’s top leaders in recent weeks as part of a campaign to compel the Iranian-backed militant group to stop firing rockets and drones at Israel. For nearly a year, Hezbollah has been attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, displacing tens of thousands of Israelis from border communities.
The campaign against the top echelon in Hezbollah comes after months of attacks that, Israeli military analysts said, have somewhat degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities.
Over the past two months, Israel has killed at least two members of Hezbollah’s top military decision-making body, the Jihad Council, and tried to assassinate another.
In July, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed Fuad Shukr, one of the leaders of Hezbollah’s military operations and a confidante of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. That attack was a reprisal for a rocket attack from Lebanon that killed 12 children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
Last Friday, Israeli forces flattened a residential building in an airstrike targeting Ibrahim Aqeel, another top Hezbollah leader, alongside several other leaders of the group’s commando unit. At least 55 people were killed in the strike, including several children and other noncombatants.
And on Monday, Israel tried to assassinate a third member of the Jihad Council, Ali Karaki, with an airstrike in Beirut. Hezbollah has denied that Mr. Karaki was killed and has said he had been taken to a “safe place” in the wake of the strike.
Israel’s strikes on Lebanon are some of the deadliest in decades.
Israel’s strikes on Lebanon on Monday amounted to one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare, outstripping even the bombing of Gaza during the opening days of the Israeli-Hamas war in October, war experts said.
The death count is also one of the highest daily tolls in recent global wars, and could rise because people are still believed to be trapped under the rubble in Lebanon.
War death tolls are estimates, and exact comparisons between conflicts are difficult. But the toll on Monday in Lebanon exceeded most daily tolls in Gaza over the past year and more than doubled the average daily death rate during the deadliest year of the Syrian civil war.
Here’s what else to know.
The number of targets struck by Israel
The Israeli military said it hit more than 1,600 targets in Lebanon on Monday, a number that has few, if any, precedents in 21st-century warfare, according to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, a British conflict monitor.
It is roughly 300 more than the number of targets Israel struck during the opening three days of its Gaza offensive after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 — a number that itself was considered unusually high.
During the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, Western fighter jets struck an average of 650 targets a month across a much wider area, according to data published by the Department of Defense.
“Prior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,” Ms. Tripp said. “There is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.”
The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired 250 rockets toward Israel on Monday, most of which were intercepted by Israeli air-defense missiles or missed their targets. At least one man was reported to have been wounded by shrapnel. Since October, Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 missiles toward Israeli positions, according to the Israeli military.
How the Lebanese death toll compares
The Lebanese health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said 558 people were killed on Monday in Israeli strikes — an unusually high number by the standards of contemporary war, experts said.
In Gaza last October, it took 18 days for the reported daily death toll to exceed 500. The Monday toll is about half the entire casualty count during the monthlong Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. And it is far higher than the average daily toll during the Syrian war in 2014, the deadliest year of that decade-long conflict.
How the Lebanese government collates the death toll
Lebanon’s health ministry runs an emergency operations center that collects casualty numbers from private and state-run hospitals, collating them to create a national toll from the war, according to health officials.
These figures have historically been viewed as reliable and are cited regularly by the United Nations, which helped the ministry develop the operations center.
Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite militia backed by Iran, does not run the ministry. It is overseen by the government of Lebanon, whose members are split along sectarian and political lines.
Dr. Abiad, a former board chairman at Lebanon’s largest hospital, is generally considered apolitical and won praise and prominence for his data-driven assessments during the coronavirus pandemic. He was first proposed for the role of health minister by Saad Hariri, a Sunni former prime minister who is not allied with Hezbollah, and was formally appointed by Mr. Hariri’s successor.
The ratio of slain combatants to civilians
The Lebanese health ministry does not provide detailed breakdowns of the numbers of civilians and combatants killed. But Dr. Abiad said in a brief phone interview on Tuesday that the “overwhelming majority, if not all,” of those killed and injured on Monday were civilians.
For his statement to be true, the number of civilian men killed in Lebanon on Monday would need to overwhelmingly exceed the combined number of slain women and children. The Lebanese health ministry said that 94 women and 50 children were killed on Monday, or just over 25 percent of the total death toll, but it did not specify the number of slain male civilians.
The Israeli military has said it was targeting military operatives, weapons caches and rocket launchers, many of them hidden in civilian neighborhoods and homes.
Ms. Tripp said the number of slain women and children was “consistent with what we’ve seen in conflicts such as Iraq, but lower compared to the recent Gaza war.”
In Gaza, more than 54 percent of the roughly 34,000 people recently named as victims by the Gaza health authorities were said to be either women or boys and girls under 18. Roughly 7,000 other victims are still to be identified by the health authorities, according to the ministry’s chief statistician.
Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.
Families of hostages and Gazans feel forgotten as fighting heats up in Lebanon.
After six Israeli hostages were found dead recently in Gaza, shocking the country, the families of the remaining captives hoped that the tragedy might pressure Israel to accept a cease-fire agreement to secure their release.
But now, as Israeli fighter jets swoop over Lebanon and Hezbollah fires rockets into northern Israel, the conversation in Israel has shifted toward a potential war in the north. Few believe that an agreement to free their loved ones in Gaza is imminent.
After nearly a year, roughly 100 of the more than 250 hostages held by Hamas since their Oct. 7 attacks remain in the clutches of Palestinian militants in Gaza. They include women and older people kidnapped from their homes, as well as soldiers abducted from military bases.
Israel and Hamas are deadlocked in negotiations over conditions for a truce that would free them. The Israeli authorities have declared that more than 30 hostages are already presumed dead, and their families fear that number will only rise as their loved ones languish in captivity.
With all eyes on Israel’s escalating battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon, many families now fear any hopes to save the hostages are rapidly vanishing, said Itzik Horn, whose sons Eitan, 38, and Iair, 46, are still held.
“We’ve been abandoned again and again” by the Israeli government, said Mr. Horn. “And now, the resources and attention are heading to the north.”
Both Eitan and Iair were abducted from Nir Oz, a border village that was devastated by the Hamas-led attack. Many of its roughly 400 members were either killed or kidnapped by Palestinian militants.
Eitan was visiting his brother, who held various roles in Nir Oz, including running the local pub, when the attack began. Soon afterward, Itzik, their father, lost contact with them. In November, a weeklong truce with Hamas secured the release of 105 hostages, some of whom attested to having seen the two brothers in the tunnels, said Mr. Horn.
Noam Dan, a relative of Ofer Kalderon — who was also abducted from Nir Oz — accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, of “cruelly neglecting” the remaining hostages in favor of the escalation. Mr. Kalderon’s children, Sahar and Erez, were released in the weeklong truce with Hamas in November.
Mr. Netanyahu has said that he is committed to securing the release of the remaining hostages. But he has repeatedly said he will not agree to a cease-fire with Hamas that compromises on what he called Israel’s fundamental security needs.
Like many close to the remaining captives, Ms. Dan said she believed Mr. Netanyahu was more worried about the future of his government than securing the release of the hostages. Some of his coalition partners have opposed recent cease-fire proposals.
“What matters to him most is his political survival, and now he’s managed to redirect the conversation close to the anniversary of his resounding failure,” she said. Ms. Dan and others blame Mr. Netanyahu’s government for failing to prevent Hamas’s surprise assault on Israel last year.
Gazans similarly fear that their plight will be shoved aside as the conflict there nears a once-unthinkable milestone: a year of almost constant war. Hundreds of thousands have crowded into an Israeli-designated “humanitarian zone” in central and southern Gaza, often living in rudimentary tent encampments where finding enough food and water can be a daily struggle.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have participated in demonstrations calling on the Israeli government to reach an agreement with Hamas to free the captives. The discovery of the six hostages dead in a tunnel a little over three weeks ago — executed by their Hamas guards, according to Israel — shocked the country and prompted mass protests.
But the negotiations stalled, primarily over Mr. Netanyahu’s demand to retain an Israeli military presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Hamas immediately rejected the condition.
In Israel, television panels full of former generals and political analysts pick apart the latest reports of strikes and counter-strikes over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Correspondents report from northern Israeli communities under rocket fire.
“There’s no momentum, no negotiations, not even a bit of anything. Everyone’s now busy with war in the north,” Mr. Horn said.
France’s Horrifying Rape Trial Has a Feminist Hero
Each morning, when Gisèle Pelicot arrives at the courthouse, dozens of supporters, mainly women, are already there, waiting for her. When she leaves each night, they line her path to applaud and cheer.
Many call her “Gisèle,” as if they know her, though few do personally. In her chic image, they see themselves, their mothers, their grandmothers. They come to the court in the southern French city of Avignon and wait for hours to support her.
“I don’t know how she does it — her dignity,” said Catherine Armand, 62, who arrived an hour and a half before proceedings one recent morning to be first in line for a coveted place in a room in the courthouse where the trial was being broadcast.
“I admire this woman,” she added. “She is exceptional.”
In the three weeks since the rape trial against her former husband and 50 other defendants began, Ms. Pelicot has become a feminist hero in France. Her face, framed by her red Anna Wintour bob and tan sunglasses, appears on nightly TV newscasts, the front pages of newspapers, graffitied walls and signs held up by protesters around the country.
Feminist activists and writers have penned open letters to her that have been published in newspapers and read on the radio.
They laud her courage, her strength, her dignity in confronting her horrifying story. They also praise her rare decision to fling open the doors onto her intimate hell and to insist that the trial be made public, when it could have stayed behind closed doors. Many victims feel she speaks for them.
As Hélène Devynck, a journalist and author, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde: “It is not just you, Gisèle, that they treated like a thing. They tell us all, we are insignificant. Your strength gives us back ours. Thank you for this immense gift.”
Ms. Pelicot is at the center of the most significant rape trial France has seen in decades. Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, has pleaded guilty to putting drugs in her food and drinks for almost a decade. Then he invited men into their bedroom to join him in raping her while she was drugged.
Mr. Pelicot and most of the other men on trial are charged with the aggravated rape of Ms. Pelicot.
More than a dozen of the men have pleaded guilty. Most of the rest do not dispute that they had sex with Ms. Pelicot, but they say that they did not think it was rape. Instead, they say they were tricked into it, lured by her husband for playful three-way encounters, and told that she was pretending to be asleep or some variation of that.
Before her husband’s arrest, Ms. Pelicot, 71, led a quiet life: a retired manager at a big company, a mother of three and a grandmother of seven who had moved with her husband of 50 years to a small town in Provence to enjoy hiking in the hills and swimming in the backyard pool.
Now, she arrives at court each day, dressed impeccably for battle, embodying the phrase her lawyers coined at the beginning of the trial that has become a mantra among her supporters — that shame must change sides, from the victim to the accused.
Her head held high, she sweeps past the defendants who fill the room’s many benches. They range in age from 26 to 74. They are thin, fat, bearded, smooth-faced. Many are married and have children. They work as truck drivers, construction workers, tradesmen, salesmen. There is a journalist, a nurse, a prison guard and a tech specialist among them.
By opening the doors to the public, Ms. Pelicot has opened up the view not only onto her own collapsing life and the legal process around rape but also onto the regular, mundane, normal profiles of the accused men. And many women credit her with skewering the myth of the monster rapist.
“Friend of the family, stranger at a bar or the street, brother or cousin, friend, colleague, professor, neighbor: All women can sadly find a face that brings them back to a traumatic memory among the multitudes of accused,” said an open letter published in the French daily Libération that was signed by more than 260 artists, writers, politicians, activists and historians — mostly women.
More than 40 defense lawyers fill the room in their black capes. Last week, many began to cross-examine Ms. Pelicot and to reveal their strategies. Some tried to raise doubt about Ms. Pelicot’s position that she had been completely unconscious and oblivious. They tried to poke holes in her credibility and in her self-portrayal as someone who enjoyed sex with her husband but was never interested in experimenting with other partners.
At their request, two series of pictures — 27 in total, selected from among the 20,000 photographs and videos that the police found on her husband’s electronic devices — were displayed on screens in court while the audience uncomfortably held its breath.
Most showed a woman’s intimate body parts, at times with a protruding sex toy. Some showed Ms. Pelicot’s face, her eyes open.
Ms. Pelicot remained defiant. “If this is an attempt to trap me, it’s difficult to bear,” she said. “What is it that you’re looking for here in this room, to make me look guilty?”
One lawyer asked her — causing an uproar in the courtroom — “Would you not have a secret inclination for exhibitionism?” Another suggested: “These photos are very explicit. Not all women would accept this type of photo, even with a loving husband.”
Men receiving pictures of this kind could have easily been fooled into thinking she wanted to have sex with them, they implied.
Whether or not she looked welcoming in these photos, Ms. Pelicot replied, “if a man came to have intercourse with me, he still should have asked for my consent.”
For the first time in the trial, Ms. Pelicot’s calm composure cracked. She raised her voice.
“I find it insulting,” she said. “And I understand why rape victims don’t press charges.”
The defense strategies are typical for rape trials, experts say. But now they are being aired before journalists posting updates on social media to an increasingly shocked public.
Many women say Ms. Pelicot has provided a public — and brave — demonstration about the treatment of rape victims.
“It’s a victim’s obstacle course,” said Audrey Darsonville, a professor of criminal law at the University of Nanterre. “Their whole life is scrutinized, starting with police officers asking how they were dressed, what is their sexuality, et cetera. All these questions that have nothing to do with the violence that is rape.”
“With everything she represents — a family woman, a grandmother — even she ends up being extremely mistreated by defense lawyers,” Professor Darsonville added, referring to Ms. Pelicot. “Can you imagine if she were a young woman who had consumed alcohol?”
The same lawyers who showed the photographs of Ms. Pelicot later argued against showing the footage Mr. Pelicot took of the men’s sexual interactions with his drugged wife. That, one said, would impugn the dignity of the men involved. The prosecutors argued that the edited clips were essential evidence — preciously rare in sexual assault cases. The head judge ruled that the clips would not be viewed publicly given their “indecent and shocking” nature.
Christelle Taraud, a feminist historian in Paris who edited the book “Femicides: A World History,” said that revealed a double standard.
“It’s only the reputation of men that counts,” Ms. Taraud said. “The reversal of responsibility, transforming the victims into guilty and the guilty into victims is a constant in rape trials.”
The trial has inspired soul-searching in France about the relationship between men and women. Some men have begun to speak about “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.”
Ms. Taraud said that showed a shift. “We are seeing a difficult, paradoxical, ambiguous awareness — but an awareness nonetheless in part of the French male population,” she noted.
The accused are scheduled to appear at the hearings in groups of six or seven every week. As they do, Ms. Pelicot will be forced to continue walking into the courthouse and sitting among them.
Océane Guichardon, 20, a student, was waiting to applaud Ms. Pelicot at the court recently. “We came to support her — it’s feminine solidarity, really,” she said. “Gisèle is brave. Every time we see her leave the courthouse, her head is high.”
Iran’s Dilemma: How to Preserve Its Proxies and Avoid Full-Scale War
Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is another embarrassment for Iran and its new president, raising the pressure on him to strike back at Israel to defend an important ally.
Iran has so far refused to be goaded by Israel into a larger regional war that its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, clearly does not want, analysts say. Instead, President Masoud Pezeshkian is at the United Nations hoping to present a more moderate face to the world and meeting European diplomats in the hopes of restarting talks on Iran’s nuclear program that could lead to vital sanctions relief for its hobbled economy.
In New York this week, Mr. Pezeshkian was blunt. Israel was seeking to trap his country into a wider war, he said. “It is Israel that seeks to create this all-out conflict,” he said. “They are dragging us to a point where we do not wish to go.”
After a series of humiliations, heightened by Israel’s intensified attacks on Hezbollah, Iran faces clear dilemmas.
It wants to restore deterrence against Israel while avoiding a full-scale war between the two countries that could draw in the United States and, in combination, destroy the Islamic Republic at home.
It wants to preserve the proxies that provide what it calls forward defense against Israel — Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen — without going into battle on their behalf.
And it wants to try to get some of the punishing economic sanctions against it lifted by renewing nuclear negotiations with the West while preserving its close military and trade relationships with Washington’s prime adversaries, Russia and China.
“The fundamentals have not changed for Iran,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. “Iran absolutely does not want to get into a larger war in the region,” he said. This, he added, was likely to be one reason that Iran had so far not retaliated for the assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was in Iran to attend Mr. Pezeshkian’s inauguration.
Since the overthrow of the shah in 1979 and the installation of the Islamic Republic, Iran has tried to spread its influence throughout the region and has vowed to destroy Israel. It has built a network of proxies that it finances, arms and supports but does not entirely control — Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank; the Houthis in Yemen; Shia Muslims in Iraq and Alawites in Syria; and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, believed to be equipped with upward of 150,000 missiles and rockets, with the ability to hit all of Israel.
The Hamas attack on Israel nearly a year ago has brought the role of Iran front and center. And Israel has seized an opportunity to destroy or diminish two Iranian proxies: Hamas on its southern border and Hezbollah to its north, which has sent rockets into Israel in support of Hamas, driving thousands of Israelis from their homes.
At the same time, Israel has continued a more secret war against Iran, killing senior officers in a missile attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April. Israel and Iran then exchanged strikes on each other’s territory, before pulling back.
More recently, Israel caused panic in Lebanon with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, displaying its infiltration of Hezbollah’s structure. It followed with a barrage of missiles and bombs that on Monday killed hundreds of people in Lebanon, in the deadliest day since the country’s civil war, which ended in 1990.
Middle East Crisis: Live Updates
- Israel achieved short-term aims in a week of attacks on Hezbollah, officials say, but the end goal is unclear.
- Israel says it killed another top leader of Hezbollah, the latest blow in a concerted campaign.
- Furious over the continuing war in Gaza, world leaders castigate Israel.
“Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into an attack that would produce a full-fledged war and enable Israel to take the fight to what it considers its real strategic threat, Iran itself,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Hezbollah, too, is “disinclined to engage in a conflict that is likely to lead to its own destruction,” Ms. Maloney said. For Iran, “Hezbollah is the great deterrent — its capabilities and proximity to Israel are the first line of defense for the Islamic Republic, and if it is destroyed, it leaves the Iranians significantly more vulnerable.”
The proxies represent Iran’s strategy of forward defense, to protect the Iranian homeland. The proxies are supposed to fight for Iran, Mr. Vaez explained: “It was never the principle that Iran would fight in their defense.”
For now, Iran is watching carefully, while also assuming that the well-armed and well-organized Hezbollah can stand up for itself and inflict serious damage on Israel without overt Iranian help.
Israel appears to be taking advantage of Iran’s challenges, but as ever, the risk is that it may misjudge.
There are hard-line elements in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran and within Hezbollah itself “who see confrontation with Israel as inevitable and would prefer it to be sooner,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with European Council on Foreign Relations.
Iran must shore up its axis of resistance somehow, said Cornelius Adebahr, who studies Iran for Carnegie Europe. “Iran can’t swallow this forever,” he said. “People will ask, ‘What kind of power are you if you cannot protect your proxies?’”
In a short speech on Tuesday to the United Nations, Mr. Pezeshkian accused Israel of barbarism and referred to Iran’s proxies as freedom fighters. But he also spoke of “a new era” and vowed to play “a constructive role.” Iran was ready to re-engage with the West on the nuclear issue, he said.
Mr. Pezeshkian is seen as a moderate in the Iranian system. And his victory in this year’s presidential election is considered a sign that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wants to reduce the tensions inside Iran that exploded in 2022 and were exacerbated by the more hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, who was considered a possible successor to the supreme leader but died in a helicopter crash.
Accompanied at the United Nations by experienced negotiators well known to the West, Mr. Pezeshkian is trying to present his government as moderate, pragmatic and open to diplomacy.
But the timing is complicated, with the American election in November, and it may be a last chance for such outreach.
If Iran’s proxies are battered and new negotiations on the nuclear file are unproductive, there are strong voices inside Iran who argue to weaponize Iran’s nuclear program and achieve deterrence that way. Iran might also choose to deepen its relations with Moscow, hoping to get Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense system, since its current systems have proven vulnerable to Israel.
“Iran is at a fork in the road,” Mr. Vaez said. “Iran is assessing whether there is a path forward for nuclear diplomacy. But any war that would significantly weaken Hezbollah will make Iran feel less secure and could change their nuclear calculus.”
Africa’s Youngest Elected Leader Wants a New World Order
Ruth Maclean
Reporting from Dakar, Senegal.
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye rocketed to international fame last March when he went from prison to president-elect of the West African nation of Senegal in 10 days, becoming the youngest elected leader on the continent.
He carried the hopes of the youngest, fastest-growing population on earth, who saw in him a fresh start, and a break with Africa’s many aging presidents and military rulers. But until now, he has rarely given interviews.
Speaking with The New York Times last week — in his first interview with a Western media outlet — he made the case for a different world order that gives more weight to Africa.
Before traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Faye called for “a reform of the world system and an equality among its peoples.”
Demographic importance should help determine who holds power at the United Nations, Mr. Faye said, pointing out that by 2050, Africa’s population will likely be nearly 2.5 billion — accounting for an estimated one of every four people on the planet by then.
His remarks came amid growing calls for permanent African representation on the United Nations Security Council. This month, the United States said it would support two permanent seats for African countries. But this is unlikely to happen soon, analysts say, as many other countries are demanding seats and any change requires the assent of all five permanent members with veto power.
Mr. Faye said that the current world order is hurting Africans.
For instance, he said, Africa is hardly responsible for climate change, and yet when emissions from the developed world cause the polar ice caps to melt, “this has repercussions on our shores.” He pointed to Bargny, a town in Senegal plagued by coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels where dozens of homes were recently swept away.
And he railed against the injustice of rich nations continuing to use coal while refusing to finance fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Production recently began at Senegal’s first offshore oil project, and the country is trying to build the infrastructure to convert its gas into electricity.
Mr. Faye gave the interview amid the pomp of Dakar’s presidential palace, all red carpets and gold lions. But he has gotten rid of some of the furniture in the office used by his predecessor, Macky Sall, making it a little more austere.
Mr. Faye spent most of the election’s run-up awaiting trial in jail, charged with defamation and contempt of court. He was chosen for the presidential ticket by Ousmane Sonko, Senegal’s most formidable opposition politician, who was also jailed and barred from running. When Mr. Sall released the two men 10 days before the election, thousands celebrated.
Mr. Faye won more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of the March election, beating the chosen candidate of Mr. Sall and eliminating any need for a runoff.
At 44, Mr. Faye said he feels uniquely placed to understand the challenges young Africans face. He said their main desire is “to be useful — useful to themselves, their families, their country.”
“We have to give answers to our young people, so they are not thrown into permanent despair,” said the soft-spoken Mr. Faye. More despair, he added, would help both traffickers of migrants and jihadist groups with recruitment.
Just outside the palace lay the glimmering Atlantic Ocean, where thousands of Senegalese people of Mr. Faye’s generation have died trying to make it to Europe in boats.
Ramping up job training for youth is one of his top priorities, he said.
“What’s important is that young people have qualifications,” he said, “so that when they see a job they can apply — or if they choose to migrate legally, they can be employable in the country they have chosen to go to.”
Mr. Faye and his prime minister, Mr. Sonko, captivated young Senegalese by denouncing political elites, promising to negotiate better deals with oil and gas companies, and pledging to reform the regional currency, the CFA, which is backed by France.
But six months into their term, young people are still fleeing the country in search of a better life. In the first half of 2024, nearly 20,000 migrants reached the Canary Islands, part of Spain, after crossing by boat from the coast of West Africa, according to the U.N.’s migration agency, an increase of 167 percent from 2023. Dozens of shipwrecks have been recorded.
“People expect them to take measures to tackle the high cost of living and youth unemployment,” said Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, but he said that the country’s leaders were held back by high levels of debt servicing inherited from previous administrations. “There is very little they could do in these areas.”
Unable to get some of his proposals through an opposition-dominated Parliament, Mr. Faye recently called a snap parliamentary election for November. He acknowledged that the people who elected him in “immense hope” will judge him on one main thing: his ability to transform their prospects.
“In a country like Senegal, everything is a priority and everything is urgent,” he said.