Israeli warplanes carried out late on Thursday their most intense strikes on south Lebanon in nearly a year of war, Lebanese security sources said, heightening the conflict between Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah amid calls for restraint.
In Thursday’s late operation, Israel launched dozens of bombs across southern Lebanon, three Lebanese security sources said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Israeli radio stations reported that dozens of fighter jets struck Hezbollah targets including around 100 rocket launchers.
The intense barrage followed attacks earlier in the week attributed by Lebanon and Hezbollah to Israel that blew up Hezbollah radios and pagers, killing 37 people and wounding about 3,000 in Lebanon.
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The detonation of thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives could constitute a war crime, according to a group of more than a dozen United Nations legal experts.
The experts, led by University of Sydney law professor Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, labelled the exploding pagers “a terrifying violation of international law”.
“These attacks violate the human right to life, absent any indication that the victims posed an imminent lethal threat to anyone else at the time,” the experts said in a joint statement issued from Geneva late on Thursday night.
“Such attacks require prompt, independent investigation to establish the truth and enable accountability for the crime of murder.”
Reuters with Matthew Knott
