The China Mail - Israeli strikes kill two girls in southern Lebanon, soldier killed in battle

Israel has carried out strikes across Lebanon and launched a ground invasion in the south since March 2, when Hezbollah entered the war in the Middle East on the side of its backer Iran.

In separate statements, the Lebanese health ministry reported that an Israeli strike on Habbush killed at least two girls and wounded 22 people, while a strike on al-Hawsh near the coastal city of Tyre wounded 18, including a child, three women and three paramedics.

The ministry had said in an earlier statement the strike on al-Hawsh damaged a nearby major hospital.

The director of the Lebanese Italian Hospital told the state-run National News Agency (NNA) that it would "remain open to provide the necessary medical care" despite the damage.

Tens of thousands of people have left Tyre, but around 20,000 remain, including 15,000 displaced from surrounding villages, despite Israeli evacuation warnings covering most of the city and a swathe of the south.

Hours after the attack, the Israeli army struck three buildings in and around Tyre it had warned people to evacuate, according to the NNA.

An AFP correspondent said a missile hit an 11-storey building northeast of Tyre, completely destroying it and reducing it to a pile of rubble that covered a nearby gas station.

A second raid on a five-storey building near the city levelled half of it, leaving the other half standing.

The third strike was on the Burj al-Shamali Palestinian refugee camp, southeast of the city.

Overnight strikes destroyed two buildings nearby, an AFP correspondent saw, shattering windows and also causing suspended ceilings to collapse in the hospital, management said.

Another Israeli airstrike targeted and completely destroyed a mosque in the town of Baraashit in the Bint Jbeil district, the NNA reported, along with other bombings across the south.

- 'Unacceptable' attacks -

The Israeli military announced on Saturday the death of a soldier who "fell during combat in southern Lebanon", the 11th killed since the army began ground operations in the country.

It also announced having struck "more than 140 Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure targets" over the previous two days.

Dawn strikes targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, a largely evacuated Hezbollah stronghold that has been attacked repeatedly during more than a month of war.

In a statement on Saturday, Israel's military said it had "completed an additional wave of strikes targeting command centres belonging to the Quds Force Lebanon corps in Beirut", referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations arm, and "two headquarters of the (Palestinian Islamic Jihad)".

After attacking a bridge in the West Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon on Friday "to prevent the transfer of reinforcements and military equipment", Israel hit it again on Saturday, destroying it completely, the NNA said.

West Bekaa is right above Lebanon's south, where Israeli troops have been advancing on the ground.

The NNA also reported that, in Shebaa near the eastern side of the Israeli border, Israeli forces abducted a man at around 3:00 am on Saturday.

It was at least the third time Israeli forces have seized someone from south Lebanon after infiltrating their home since the war with Hezbollah began.

The Iran-backed group claimed responsibility Saturday for a series of attacks on northern Israeli towns and Israeli troops in southern Lebanese towns near the border, particularly Marun al-Ras, Hula, Ainata and Bayada.

The war has displaced upwards of a million people in Lebanon and killed more than 1,400 people in the country, including 54 medics and three Indonesian UN peacekeepers in the south.

The United Nations force said on Friday that three peacekeepers were wounded in a blast inside a UN facility near Odaisse, and were rushed to hospital.

Jakarta slammed the incident as "unacceptable" after the UN office there confirmed the wounded were Indonesian.

Indonesia's government said "these events underscore the urgent need to strengthen protection for UN peacekeeping forces amid an increasingly dangerous conflict situation".

On Saturday, a UN security official told AFP that Israeli forces destroyed 17 surveillance cameras linked to UNIFIL's main headquarters in Naqura.

The UN peacekeeping force has been caught in the crossfire in southern Lebanon since the start of the war, with Hezbollah launching attacks on Israel and its troops, and Israeli forces pushing into border towns.

K.Leung--ThChM