On Monday, Israel issued evacuation orders for four villages in southern and eastern Lebanon, saying they were to be targeted to hit Hezbollah and Hamas infrastructure in the area. Those villages included Kfar Hatta, Ain al-Tineh, al-Manara and Annan.
The first two villages were alleged to be Hezbollah sites, and the later two Hamas sites. Though Israel routinely claims everyone and their brother in southern Lebanon is secretly a Hezbollah operative, the claim of villages hosting Hamas is unusual, as the group isn’t known to have a substantial presence in Lebanon beyond the refugee camps.
The orders led large numbers of civilian families to flee the villages, and buildings in all four villages were hit in the course of the next few hours. The al-Manara strike reportedly hit a home that once belonged to former Hamas figure Sharhabil Sayed.
Targeting Sayed would’ve conceivably made sense in the context of the Israeli attacks on Hamas, except that an Israeli drone killed the man in May of 2024.
A Lebanese Health Ministry statement reported that two people were injured in an Israeli drone strike against a vehicle in Biriquah. It is not clear if this strike was related to the targeting of the other villages, or if this was simply part of the daily Israeli background strikes on Lebanon.
It is also worth noting that all the targeted villages are north of the Litani River. The ceasefire that was meant to end the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2024 said Hezbollah must withdraw from areas south of the Litani, but it appears that the IDF is increasingly eager to escalate into other areas of the country in violation of that ceasefire.
Since the ceasefire was reached in November of 2024, Hezbollah has not fired a single rocket at Israel. Israel, by contrast, has violated the ceasefire thousands of times, killing several hundred people inside Lebanon, including many civilians.
