Wounded people are arriving en masse at hospitals and residents are fleeing in panic: an atmosphere of terror reigns in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air force launched a barrage of bombs, leaving more than 274 dead.
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Panic even spread to the capital, Beirut, where many residents received Israeli warning messages on cellphones and landlines.
“It’s a catastrophe, a massacre,” Jamal Badrane, a doctor at the People’s Aid Hospital in Nabatieh, a southern town, told AFP news agency.
“The bombings have not stopped. They bombed us when we were helping the wounded,” Badrane said.
At least 21 children have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon
The Israeli army said it had hit more than 300 targets belonging to the Islamist movement Hezbollah in Lebanon on Monday in a wave of air strikes since dawn, its largest operation against the pro-Iranian group since the start of the war.
The Lebanese Ministry of Health announced a death toll of 274, including 21 children, and more than 5,000 injured.
“The wounded are still arriving, the situation is very difficult,” said an employee of the public hospital in Tebnine, in southern Lebanon, who preferred not to be identified.
Lebanon residents flee war
The bombings threw hundreds of residents of southern Lebanon into the streets as they tried to flee the bombardment.
In the coastal city of Tyre “hundreds of people arrived” at a school that houses displaced people, said Bilal Kachmar, an official with the disaster management agency, while many are “camping on the streets.”
“Others are sitting in the streets” waiting to be rehoused, he added.
“Our village has been spared from bombs until now”
Hundreds of vehicles carrying entire families were stuck in huge traffic jams in Sidon, a major city in southern Lebanon, AFP photographers noted.
Nazir Rida, a journalist, hastily left Beirut to find his family in the village of Babliyeh.
“Nobody expected this sudden escalation. Our village had so far been spared from the bombs,” he told AFP, in traffic jams in Sidon.
“I left my children in the village, which is considered safer than the southern suburbs of Beirut,” a Hezbollah stronghold that was targeted last week by a bombing that left 45 people dead, including many civilians.
Education Minister Abbas Halabi announced the closure of all schools across the country on Tuesday.
Buildings evacuated in Lebanon after Israeli attack
In Beirut, many residents received Israeli warning messages at their homes or offices.
“I received a message on my cell phone saying ‘if you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, stay away'”Khaled, a resident of the capital who did not want to give his last name, told AFP.
The same recorded message was received on the landlines of many offices, including that of Information Minister Ziad Makary.
“When the minister’s assistant answered, she heard a recorded message asking (staff) to evacuate the building or they would be under bombs,” the minister’s office said.
The minister denounced the “psychological war” that, according to him, Israel is waging.
The Lebanese state radio station, located in the same building, received a similar message and people present evacuated the building, an AFP photographer noted.
Schools and kindergartens in downtown Beirut Parents were asked to pick up their children half-way through the day, according to parents.
Hezbollah, a powerful political and military actor in Lebanon, opened a front on the border with Israel almost a year ago, after the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, in support of its Islamist ally Hamas, in power in that Palestinian territory.
Artillery duels on both sides of the border have multiplied since last week’s wave of explosions using Hezbollah beepers and walkie-talkies, blamed on Israel, which left 39 dead and nearly 3,000 wounded in the militia’s strongholds in Lebanon, according to officials.
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Source: https://www.noticiascaracol.com/mundo/mas-de-270-muertos-dejan-bombardeos-de-israel-en-libano-una-catastrofe-una-masacre-cb20
