Late on Tuesday, Israel carried out airstrikes against the town of Barja, just some 30 km south of the Lebanese capital of Beirut. The attacks came without warning, hitting an apartment building and causing substantial harm to the civilians in the area.
15 were initially reported killed, but that toll has continued to rise throughout the night and into Wednesday, with rescue workers continuing to recover bodies from the rubble. The current death toll is at least 30, with more bodies expected to be found going forward. 14 wounded survivors have been recovered.
The apartment building that was targeted is reported to have housed a large number of displaced civilians from the surrounding area. Barja is roughly in the middle of Beirut and Sidon, and both of those cities have seen airstrikes and evacuation orders in the areas for weeks.
Displaced were headed to Barja because it’s outside of the evacuation zones, though as we’ve seen in other places, the airstrikes hit the town irrespective of that. Barja was hit with a smaller attack on October 14. Four people were killed in that incident.
The real mystery is not that an attack came outside the evacuation zones. The question is why Israel attacked Barja at all. The town is Sunni majority, and subsequently is not believed to have any substantial Hezbollah presence.
This isn’t the first time Israel has attacked a seemingly unrelated target in Lebanon, of course. In mid-October they attacked a Christian majority village in northern Lebanon, killing 22 people there. Once again, there was never any formal explanation for why the village was attacked.
