Late on Tuesday, Israel carried out airstrikes against the town of Barja, about 18.5 miles south of the Lebanese capital of Beirut. The attacks came without warning, hitting an apartment building and killing and wounding many civilians.
Fifteen were reported killed initially, but the toll continued to rise through Tuesday night on into Wednesday as rescue workers recovered more bodies from the rubble. The current death toll is at least 30, with more bodies expected to be found. Fourteen wounded survivors have also been recovered.
The targeted apartment building is reported to have housed a large number of displaced civilians from the surrounding area. Barja is midway between Beirut and Sidon, and both of those cities have endured airstrikes and evacuation orders for weeks.
The displaced headed to Barja because it was not listed as an evacuation zone. But, as has happened elsewhere, airstrikes targeted the town irrespective of that. Earlier, on October 14, Barja was hit in a smaller attack in which four people were killed.
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, not believed to have a substantial Hezbollah presence. Israel claimed they were hitting “terrorist infrastructure,” which is a strange way to refer to an apartment building full of civilians.
This isn’t the first Israeli attack on a seemingly unrelated target in Lebanon. In mid-October they attacked a Christian majority village in northern Lebanon, killing 22. Once again, there was never any formal explanation for why the village was attacked.
