BEIRUT (Dispatches) -- Nine Zionists were injured in a rocket attack launched from Lebanon targeting Karmiel in northern Israeli occupied territories Friday, the regime’s media reported.
The Israeli military said it had detected 30 rockets launched from Lebanon. Hezbollah said it launched a “rocket salvo” targeting the city, adding that it had also fired rockets toward the settlements of Ma’alot-Tarshiha and Kiryat Shmona in northern occupied territories.
The retaliatory strikes came after Lebanon’s health ministry said 10 people had been martyred in an initial toll for Israeli strikes in the country’s east on Friday, most of them in a single village.
“Ten martyrs and 26 wounded in a preliminary toll for today’s Israeli enemy strikes on the Baalbek-Hermel region,” the ministry said, adding eight were killed in the village of Amhaz.
The Zionist regime on Friday also struck a building in the coastal city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, after other heavy Israeli raids there in recent days.
Friday’s strike leveled the building on the city’s seafront, where rescuers and paramedics were seen pulling people from under the rubble.
The strikes followed a renewed but as yet of fruitless bout of purported U.S.-led diplomacy aimed at getting a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon to stop over a year of the Israeli genocide.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said Israel’s “expansion” of its attacks on his country indicated a rejection of efforts to broker a truce after more than a month of war.
“The Israeli enemy’s renewed expansion of the scope of its aggression on Lebanese regions, its repeated threats to the population to evacuate entire cities and villages, and its renewed targeting of the southern suburbs of Beirut with destructive raids are all indicators that confirm the Israeli enemy’s rejection of all efforts being made to secure a ceasefire,” Mikati said Friday.
Mikati’s statement came a day after reports said Israel’s extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had met visiting U.S. officials to discuss a possible deal to end his war on Lebanon.
The Lebanese premier said Israel’s diplomatic behavior suggested it was rejecting a ceasefire.
“Israeli statements and diplomatic signals that Lebanon received confirm Israel’s stubbornness in rejecting the proposed solutions and insisting on the approach of killing and destruction,” Mikati said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Mikati said U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein had signaled during a phone call that a ceasefire in the war was possible before U.S. elections are held on November 5.
The same day, Hezbollah’s new leader Sheikh Naim Qassem said the resistance movement would agree to a ceasefire with Israel under acceptable terms, but added that a viable deal has yet to be presented.
On Thursday, Israeli strikes killed a total of 11 people, including children, and injured 14 others in the Lebanese city of Baalbek and nearby villages.
In retaliation, rocket barrages from Lebanon into northern occupied territories killed seven settlers, Israeli medics said, the deadliest cross-border strikes since Israel invaded Lebanon.
Projectiles from Lebanon crashed into an area in Metula, the northernmost town, killing five settlers, officials said.
Hours later, the Israeli military reported another volley of some 25 rockets from Lebanon, striking an olive grove in a suburb of the northern port city of Haifa. That strike killed two settlers wile wounding two others, said Magen David Adom, Israel’s main emergency medical organization.
Israeli strikes martyred 24 people in Lebanon on Thursday, among them 13 people in the country’s eastern Bekaa Valley, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News agency.
Israeli warnings to residents to evacuate the city sent thousands of people fleeing and spread panic across the city known for its colossal Roman ruins.
The Lebanese Health Ministry reported that over the last 24 hours, Israeli bombardments killed 45 people and wounded 110 in various parts of the country.
Jean Fakhry, a local official in the Deir al-Ahmar region in the Bekaa Valley, said Israeli airstrikes pummeling the area turned the main highway “a parking lot” of fleeing cars stuck in traffic.
“Our homes were destroyed,” said Zahraa Younis, from the village near Baalbek. “We came with nothing — no clothes or anything else.”