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An Israeli airstrike hit a factory in a small town in southern Lebanon, killing at least 10 civilians, Lebanese officials said on Saturday, as people across the Middle East uneasily awaited reprisals against Israel by Iran and its allies for a pair of assassinations.
Israel’s military said it had targeted a weapons warehouse in the area used by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, in the strike overnight on Friday. But the mayor of the town of Toul, where the attack took place, denied the claim.
The strike appeared to have destroyed the factory and an adjacent structure inhabited by Syrian refugees who worked there and their families. Reporters who visited the site saw steel beams but no signs of weaponry.
The mayor of Toul, Saeed Mahmoud, said in a phone interview that the factory was used to collect steel spare parts.
The death toll was one of the largest so far in Lebanon amid the near-daily exchange of border attacks with Israel in the 10 months since the war in Gaza began. Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militants have been attacking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, leading to months of cross-border fire by both sides.
The tensions have escalated sharply in recent weeks following the killings of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, a top leader of Hamas, groups allied with Iran. Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to retaliate more forcefully than before against Israel, leaving the Middle East on tenterhooks for more than two weeks, awaiting the reprisals.
The Biden administration has led a diplomatic push this past week for a Gaza cease-fire, which U.S. and regional officials hope would prompt Iran and its allies to curb any retaliation and avert a wider regional war. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is scheduled to travel to Israel on Saturday to help facilitate the talks, which are being mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.
All of the people killed in the strike on Toul, near the southern city of Nabatiye, were Syrian refugees and included a woman and her two children, said the Lebanese health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad.
More than a million Syrian refugees fled to Lebanon to escape a long-running civil war at home that began in 2011. Syrian laborers often live with their families where they work.
On Saturday afternoon, Israeli drones circled above the remnants of the destroyed factory. Next door, a collapsed concrete building held what appeared to be the sleeping quarters of the workers and their families. The broken concrete and the metal rebar that once supported the structure were strewed with clothing and the broken plastic of a child’s car seat.
One laborer was killed where he was sleeping along with his wife and two children, according to rescue workers who dug them out of the rubble. At least six other laborers were killed in the strike and two were wounded, the rescue workers said.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the claim that civilians were harmed in the attack.
Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened in July to hit new targets in Israel if it continued to target civilians in Lebanon. In response to the latest attack, Hezbollah said it fired a barrage of rockets at Ayelet Hashachar, a kibbutz in northern Israel.
The Israeli military said roughly 55 rockets crossed into Israeli territory, some of which ignited fires. There were no immediate reports of casualties. An Israeli soldier was severely wounded in a separate rocket attack from Lebanon on Saturday morning, the military said.
For months, Israel and Lebanon have appeared to carefully calibrate their attacks in an attempt to avoid a wider escalation.
Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets and drones at northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas, which led the massive surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war in Gaza.
Israel has responded to attacks from Lebanon with bombardments that have killed more than 500 people, most of them Hezbollah fighters, according to figures from the Lebanese health ministry, Hezbollah and the United Nations.
But after a rocket attack from Lebanon in late July that killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, Israel killed Mr. Shukr, one of Hezbollah’s highest-ranking military commanders, in an apartment in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Hours later, an explosion widely attributed to Israel killed Mr. Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political bureau, who was staying in a closely guarded state guesthouse in the Iranian capital, Tehran, to attend the inauguration of a new Iranian president. Israel never publicly confirmed its involvement.
Iran and its ally Hezbollah have pledged to avenge the killings. But U.S., Iranian and Israeli officials said on Friday that Iran had decided to delay any reprisals against Israel to allow mediators to continue working toward a cease-fire in Gaza.
High-level talks in Qatar on a truce and the release of the 115 hostages still held by Hamas and its allies in Gaza ended without an immediate breakthrough on Friday. But the United States, Egypt and Qatar said the negotiations would go on next week in Cairo, as mediators raced to try to secure a deal.
Even as senior officials have shuttled from capital to capital in an attempt to end the war, the fighting in Gaza has gone on. Israeli aircraft struck dozens of sites across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the Israeli military said on Saturday, and ground troops swept through parts of the southern city of Khan Younis, already devastated in an earlier assault.
The Israeli military again ordered Palestinians to flee parts of central Gaza that Israel had previously designated a “humanitarian zone” for many of the nearly two million Gazans who have been displaced during the war.
Avichay Adraee, an Israeli military spokesman, said Hamas and other militant groups had repeatedly fired rockets from the area.
Many Gazans have been displaced multiple times by the war. Aid groups say there is still nowhere safe for them to go, as Israel has vowed to target Hamas wherever it believes the organization is operating.
“Many of the thousands of families affected only recently arrived in the area, after other displacement orders in Khan Younis,” said Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees.
Gazans are “trapped in an endless nightmare,” she said.
Hwaida Saad, Victoria Kim and Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting.
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