Lebanese Health Minister Dr. Firass Abiad told The New York Times on Tuesday that the “overwhelming majority, if not all,” of the people killed and wounded by Israel’s bombardment in Lebanon on Monday were civilians.
The death toll from Lebanon’s Health Ministry puts the number of killed by the Monday bombing at 558, which includes 50 children and 94 women. Nearly 2,000 were wounded in the attack.
The Times notes that Lebanon’s Health Ministry’s figures have historically been viewed as reliable. The ministry is not run by Hezbollah but is overseen by the Lebanese government and collects its data using an emergency operations center that gathers casualty figures from private and state-run hospitals.
Israel targeted residential areas of southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, claiming Hezbollah missiles were being hidden inside houses. The Israeli military said that it hit more than 1,600 targets, and experts say it’s one of the heaviest single-day bombings in modern warfare. The toll in Israel’s bombardment is about half of the toll for the entire 2006 Lebanon War, which lasted 34 days.
“Prior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,” Emily Tripp, director of the monitoring group Airwars, told the Times. “There is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.”
The US supported the Israeli bombardment despite previously claiming it opposed escalation and is sending more troops to the region as a show of support. Israeli strikes continue to hit Lebanon on Tuesday, and Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel in response.
