BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Health Ministry said on Saturday that seven people, including a child and a pregnant woman, were killed and 46 others injured in Israeli strikes on the southern city of Tyre the previous day, with rescuers still searching for those missing under the rubble.

Repeated airstrikes on the city’s neighborhoods brought down buildings, trapping residents.

The strikes hampered civil defense rescue efforts during the night. Rescuers resumed work early on Saturday in search of the missing.

Israeli airstrikes on the city of Nabatieh devastated one of the country’s most important heritage homes owned by the late former minister Rafiq Shaheen.

Another heritage home belonging to Kamal Daher, which previously served as the headquarters for the Cultural Council of South Lebanon, was also destroyed.

Airstrikes targeting the western Bekaa region killed six people.

Hezbollah continued its military operations, and Israeli media reported in the afternoon that several rockets landed in Metula, damaging a house.

The group said it targeted a military gathering on the border of the settlement.

Airstrikes on the south continued along with Hezbollah’s responses.

Mohammed Shamseddine, a researcher from Information International, said that Israel had so far destroyed 22 border towns out of 29 locations along the 120 km front stretching from Ras Al-Naqoura in the west, through the western and central sectors, and reaching the Shebaa farms in the east, near the Syrian border.

Shamseddine accused Israel of “adopting a scorched-earth policy in these areas.”

He said Israel was “destroying everything and leaving no signs of life to prevent residents from returning to any potential settlement in the future.”

Shamseddine estimated that up to 44,000 housing units had been destroyed, with the cost of reconstruction reaching $4.2 billion.

Hostilities continued as the Supreme Islamic Shariah Council emphasized Lebanon’s need to “restore its decision, role, power, and status, and implement the constitution and the Taif agreement.”

The council said that it stands by “caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s efforts to overcome the ordeal faced by Lebanon and contain the consequences of the Israeli aggression against the country.”

The council’s stance came on the eve of Miktai’s departure for Riyadh to take part in the extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Saudi Arabia is convening the talks to address Israel’s aggression in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as the resulting devastation.

The Shariah Council, which includes all Sunni segments, called for “the need to live within the state, accept the idea of the state, respect its laws and constitution, and subject oneself to its authority.”

The council said that “outside the state, we are conflicting groups, communities, and tribes,” adding that “the state of the constitution, institutions, and human dignity can save Lebanon and restore its economic stability, advancement, and prosperity.”

The council, led by Lebanon’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian, met on Saturday with Mikati.

It called on the UN Security Council to “secure an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, compel Israel to implement the ceasefire, and apply the UN Charter, which calls for pacific settlement of disputes.”

It added that Israel no longer abided by the charter, and should lose its UN membership.

The Shariah Council urged “the Security Council to answer the Lebanese state’s call and immediately implement UN Resolution 1701 in full, thereby ensuring the end of the war and enabling the Lebanese armed forces to exercise their national right to defend Lebanon, while providing them with all the capabilities and possibilities to fulfill this role.”

The council criticized Hezbollah’s support indirectly, saying that “what has happened and is still happening now is a challenging test that we hope we have learned from, as it has led to the destruction of the whole country.”

The council urged “the state, with all its institutions, and all Lebanese to support the displaced people, provide them with resilience and health care means, and preserve civil peace.”

Israeli hostilities against Lebanon escalated in the past 24 hours.

A video featuring several Israeli soldiers invading houses in southern Lebanon was shared on social media, prompting widespread anger among Lebanese.

Israeli media reported on Saturday afternoon that explosions were heard after sirens sounded in the Krayot and Western Galilee, adding that Hezbollah fired 10 rockets targeting Nahariya, Acre, and Krayot.

Hezbollah said that it shot down a Hermes 450 drone with a surface-to-air missile over Deir Seriane and that Israeli warplanes attacked the town.

The southern suburbs of Beirut and the southern region experienced intense Israeli assaults from Friday night into early Saturday.

For two hours, 14 airstrikes targeted the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Targeted locations included Hadath, Burj Al-Barajneh, Haret Hreik, and the Al-Jamous neighborhood, with operations extending to the area surrounding the Lebanese University building in Hadath.

Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee said that the “airstrikes, guided by precise intelligence from the military intelligence agency, targeted command centers, a weapons production site, and other infrastructure belonging to the terrorist organization Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”

The assertion made by the Israeli army that it avoids targeting civilians by issuing prior evacuation warnings did not hold for the southern region, particularly in Tyre.

BEIRUT: Hundreds of thousands of Syrians refugees have returned to their country since Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment on wide swathes of Lebanon in September. Many who fled to Lebanon after the war in Syria started in 2011 did not want to go back.
But for officials in Lebanon, the influx of returnees comes as a silver lining to the war between Israel and Hezbollah that has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million in Lebanon. Some in Syria hope the returning refugees could lead to more international assistance and relief from western sanctions.
’I wasn’t thinking at all about returning’
Nisreen Al-Abed returned to her northwest Syrian hometown in October after 12 years as a refugee in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The airstrikes had been terrifying, but what really worried her was that her 8-year-old twin daughters need regular transfusions to treat a rare blood disorder, thalassemia.
“I was afraid that in Lebanon, in this situation, I wouldn’t be able to get blood for them,” Al-Abed said.
During their dayslong journey, Al-Abed and her daughters were smuggled from government-held to opposition-held territory before reaching her parent’ house. Her husband remained in Lebanon.
“Before these events, I wasn’t thinking at all about returning to Syria,” she said.
According to the UN refugee agency, more than 470,000 people — around 70 percent of them Syrian — have crossed the border since the escalation in Lebanon began in mid-September. Lebanon’s General Security agency estimates more than 550,000 people have fled, most of them Syrian.
Most of the returnees are in government-controlled areas of Syria, according to UNHCR, while tens of thousands have made their way to the Kurdish-controlled northeast and smaller numbers to the opposition-controlled northwest.
Political leaders in Lebanon, which was hosting an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees before the recent wave of returns, have been calling for years for the displaced to go home, and many don’t want the refugees to return.
Lebanon’s caretaker Minister of Social Affairs Hector Hajjar told Russia’s Sputnik News last month that the war in Lebanon could yield “a positive benefit, an opportunity to return a large number of displaced Syrians to their country, because the situation there is now better than here.”
A political opening for Syria?
Officials in Damascus point to increasing economic pressure from the masses fleeing Lebanon as an argument for loosening western sanctions on President Bashar Assad’s government.
Syria was already suffering from spiraling inflation, and the sudden influx of refugees has driven prices up even more, as have Israeli strikes on border crossings that have slowed legal cross-border trade and smuggling.
“Everyone knows that Syria is suffering from difficult economic conditions: hyperinflation, import inflation, and an economic blockade,” said Abdul-Qader Azzouz, an economic analyst and professor at Damascus University. The influx of refugees just “increases the economic burden,” he said.
Alaa Al-Sheikh, a member of the executive bureau in Damascus province, urged the US to lift sanctions on Syria because of the huge number of arrivals.
“The burden is big and we are in pressing need of international assistance,” she said.
Rights groups have raised concerns about the treatment of returning refugees. The Jordan-based Syrian think tank ETANA estimates at least 130 people were “arbitrarily arrested at official border crossings or checkpoints inside Syria, either because they were wanted for security reasons or military service,” despite a government-declared amnesty for men who dodged the draft.
Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, noted the number of arrests is small and that Assad’s government might not view the returnees as a threat because they are mostly women and children.
Still, Daher labeled government attempts to show the returning refugees are welcome as “propaganda,” saying, “they’re unwilling and not ready in terms of economics or politics to do it.”
UNHCR head Filippo Grandi said this week that his agency is working with the Syrian government “to ensure the safety and security of all those arriving,” and he urged donors to provide humanitarian aid and financial assistance to help Syria recover after 13 years of war.
A temporary return
UNHCR regional spokeswoman Rula Amin said if people leave the country where they are registered as refugees, they usually lose their protected status.
Whether and how that will be applied in the current situation remains unclear, Amin said, underscoring the exodus from Lebanon took place “under adverse circumstances, that is under duress.”
“Given the current situation, the procedure will need to be applied with necessary safeguards and humanity,” she said.
Jeff Crisp, a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Center and a former UNHCR official, said he believes Syrians are entitled to continued international protection “because of the grave threats to their life and liberty in both countries.”
Some refugees have entered Syria via smuggler routes so their departure from Lebanon is not officially recorded, including Um Yaman, who left Beirut’s heavily bombarded southern suburbs with her children for the city of Raqqa in eastern Syria.
“When I went to Syria, to be honest, I went by smuggling, in case we wanted to go back to Lebanon later when things calm down, so our papers would remain in order in Lebanon,” she said. She asked to be identified only by her honorific (“mother of Yaman”) to be able to speak freely.
If the war in Lebanon ends, Um Yaman said, they may return, but “nothing is clear at all.”