Live Updates: Thousands Flee Southern Lebanon as Israel Presses On With Strikes Targeting Hezbollah

The Israeli military said in a statement after midnight that it had struck 1,600 targets in Lebanon related to Hezbollah, the militant group backed by Iran, on Monday. Panicked by the scope and intensity of the attacks, civilians fled southern Lebanon and sought the relative safety of Beirut, clogging the main roads leading into the capital.

The Lebanese health ministry said at least 492 people had been killed and about 1,640 were injured on Monday, figures that did not distinguish between civilians and combatants. It was the deadliest day in Lebanon since the country’s civil war ended in 1990, and the pace of Israeli strikes appeared to surpass that seen during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese people were killed over a month.

Air-raid sirens sounded across northern Israel into the early hours of Tuesday as rockets and other munitions were fired from Lebanon, most of which were intercepted. There were no deaths or serious injuries reported.

Here is what else to know:

• Commander targeted: An Israel airstrike in Beirut on Monday aimed to kill Ali Karaki, a member of Hezbollah’s top leadership, according to three current and former Israeli officials. Hezbollah said in a statement that he was alive. Israeli strikes in recent months have killed other members of Hezbollah’s top leadership.

• Automated calls: People in Lebanon received text messages and automated calls warning them to move away from Hezbollah’s weapons caches. That drew criticism from rights groups, which argued that Lebanese civilians would have no means of knowing where military targets were located. Lebanon’s information minister accused Israel of “psychological warfare.”

• U.N. meeting: France’s foreign minister said his country was requesting an emergency Security Council meeting on the situation in Lebanon, as world leaders gathered for the United Nations General Assembly this week.

• U.S. troops deploy: The Pentagon said it was sending dozens of additional U.S. troops to the Middle East. About 40,000 American service members are stationed in the region.

1. Displaced children at a shelter in Beirut.

   Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

2. A driver passes damaged buildings in Jbaa, in southern Lebanon.

   By The Associated Press

3. Cars from the south traveling toward Beirut.

   Ibrahim Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

4. A fire in Kiryat Shmona, Israel, after a strike from Lebanon.

   Leo Correa/Associated Press

5. Smoke billowing after strikes, as seen from Marjayoun, Lebanon.

   Hussein Malla/Associated Press

6. Residents in Beirut, Lebanon, filling the tanks of their cars while preparing to leave the city.

   Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

7. An older Lebanese who fled his home in the south arriving in Beirut.

   Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

8. Ambulances arriving to the scene of a strike in Habbouch, Lebanon.

   StringersHub via Associated Press

9. The Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel, after moving to an underground parking facility.

   Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times

10. People displaced from southern Lebanon seeking shelter at a school in Beirut.

    Associated Press

11. An airstrike is seen from a rooftop in Mazraat Sinai, Lebanon.

    StringersHub via Associated Press

12. People leaving Tyre, Lebanon.

    Aziz Taher/Reuters

13. Police explosive experts at a site in northern Israel where a rocket from Lebanon landed.

    Ayal Margolin/Reuters

14. An Israeli fighter jet seen from northern Israel.

    Ariel Schalit/Associated Press

The message was also heard on at least one Lebanese radio station, where Israel managed to seize control of the airwaves.

Israel was able to send the calls and texts by hacking into Lebanon’s telecommunications systems, a practice they have perfected over the last decade in Lebanon and in Gaza, according to two Israeli intelligence officers.

Once they are within Lebanon’s systems, Israeli military intelligence units can direct the messages and phone calls to reach cellphones that are geolocated to a certain area.

Israel’s military sees the practice as proof that they try to evacuate civilians from strike zones, said the officers.

Lebanese officials denied that the country’s telecommunications network had been breached. Johnny Corm, Lebanon’s telecommunications minister, said in a statement that “deceptive electronic applications” had been used to hack the system, which did not require “advanced technology to exploit the network.”

The Lebanese government was responding by transitioning to what appeared to be a more rudimentary telecommunications system, which Mr. Corm said was “less susceptible to breaches and allows for better control.”

Israel’s own telecommunication systems are also vulnerable to attack. Last week, the country’s National Cyber Directorate said that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible for millions of text messages being sent to Israeli cellphones with a threatening note that everyone should leave their homes.

“If you want to live, leave,” read some of the messages. Others told Israelis they would see their loved ones in hell.

Lebanon’s information minister, Ziad Makary, said in a statement that his office in Beirut received a recorded message telling people to leave the building. The economic ministry and culture ministry were also affected by the breach, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency.

“This comes in the framework of the psychological war implemented by the enemy,” Mr. Makary said.

Euan Ward contributed reporting.

“Yesterday, Hezbollah attacked indiscriminately in the Haifa area and in northern Israel, putting about half a million more civilians in the firing range,” Mr. Katz wrote in the complaint. He added, “Israel is not interested in an all-out war. However, we will employ all necessary means to defend ourselves and our civilians in accordance with international law.”

The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, called on Monday for an immediate cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, according to his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric. “There is no military solution that will make either side safer,” Mr. Dujarric said in a statement.

He added that the secretary general “urges the parties to recommit to the full implementation of Security Council resolution 1701 (2006) and immediately return to a cessation of hostilities to restore stability.”

Tensions in the Middle East — and efforts to defuse them — have had international diplomats scrambling since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks set off a devastating war in Gaza more than 11 months ago. Much of their attention has been focused on seeking a cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel that would end the fighting and return dozens of hostages taken from Israel on Oct. 7. Hezbollah has said that it will stop firing on Israel if an agreement is reached, and Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, reiterated this position in a speech on Sunday.

But the cease-fire talks have stalled in recent weeks, and tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have intensified, raising widespread fear that the conflict could escalate further and possibly draw in Iran.

This escalation has put the focus back on Resolution 1701, which was supposed to keep the peace between Israel and Hezbollah.

That resolution marked a turning point in the situation in southern Lebanon. Israel and allied forces had occupied a strip of that area starting in 1985, withdrawing in 2000. The resolution was adopted six years later, when Israeli forces returned amid a new round of intense fighting with Hezbollah.

Resolution 1701 called for a “permanent cease-fire” and the establishment of a buffer area south of the Litani River in Lebanon to be free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons other than those of the government of Lebanon and a U.N. peacekeeping force.

The resolution also envisioned the demilitarization of Hezbollah. It reiterated goals of a 2004 resolution with similar aims but no enforcement mechanism that had been largely ignored.

When 1701 was adopted unanimously in 2006, the U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said the resolution would allow a new and stronger Lebanon to emerge, with the world’s help, adding, “Now, the hard and urgent work of implementation begins.”

Since then, Hezbollah has gained political and military might. In 2008, Israel sought peace talks with Lebanon’s government but was rebuffed, in large part because Hezbollah had gained political power in an agreement with the Lebanese government.

Although the U.N. deemed Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 complete, Israel remained in a portion of land there known as Shabaa Farms. The U.N. considered it part of the Syrian Golan Heights occupied by Israel. But Lebanon and Hezbollah said the land was Lebanese, Syria did not interfere, and this is one reason Hezbollah has given for remaining in the area and armed.

Israel maintains that Hezbollah has built up its arsenal of missiles aimed at Israel’s northern border and has built underground tunnels that would allow the militant group to infiltrate and attack Israel. In 2006, Palestinian militants used a tunnel to enter Israel, kill two soldiers and kidnap a third, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years. In 2018, after a military operation that uncovered tunnels built by Hezbollah, Israel called for international action. U.N. forces in Lebanon confirmed the presence of those tunnels.

Mr. Katz’s letter on Monday defended Israel’s strike on Beirut on Friday that killed a top Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, and others. He said that the Israeli military attacked Lebanon’s capital to target the group’s leadership and thwart Hezbollah’s plans to infiltrate Israel to attack, drawing a parallel to the Oct. 7 attack.

His call for enforcement of Resolution 1701 will no doubt be echoed by many speakers at the General Assembly’s annual meeting this week. But how to enforce it — an issue raised by the United States and other supporters when it was first adopted, and again by representatives of member states at a Security Council meeting about the situation in Lebanon on Friday — has yet to be resolved.

Three Israelis, who had sustained moderate injuries early on Sunday in an attack on the city of Kiryat Bialik, which is just northeast of Haifa, were treated at the hospital’s new premises and released.

Northern Israel’s medical emergency plan, developed over more than a decade, was ready for an escalation of the cross-border conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. The idea to move the hospital below ground in case of an attack was hatched in 2006 — the year of the war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel — and building work began four years later, according to David Ratner, a spokesman for the hospital.

“The whole idea was to build a parking lot into which all the needs for a functioning hospital were embedded,” he said. The teaching hospital was currently treating 650 people in its new location and had the capacity for 1,200, he said.

Israel last year ordered around 80,000 people to evacuate from their homes close to the Lebanese border after Hezbollah began firing missiles and drones into Israel in support of the Hamas-led attacks from Gaza on Oct. 7 in the south. Israel has replied with assassinations of Hezbollah commanders and aerial assaults of its own, forcing at least 90,000 people to evacuate their homes in the past year in southern Lebanon.

The conflict has escalated significantly in the past week, and Lebanon’s health ministry on Monday ordered hospitals in the south, along with some in the country’s east, to suspend all elective surgeries in order to make room for the wounded.

At the Rambam hospital on Monday, doctors and nurses were treating patients in full-size hospital beds positioned between two white lines that had previously marked parking spots on vinyl flooring. Lighting from the parking lot lit the space, and arrows noted driving directions, giving the makeshift medical center a somewhat surreal air.

For now, the hospital’s case load remains within reasonable norms, but Dr. Assaf Zeltzer, the director of plastic surgery, said there was capacity for a surge in activity if necessary.

“We will be able to function smoothly in a case of a mass casualty emergency,” he said.

Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, declined to say exactly how many troops were deploying, citing operational security.

“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,” he said.

The deployment comes a day after Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III called his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Mr. Austin “stressed the importance of finding a path to a diplomatic solution that will allow residents on both sides of the border to return to their homes as quickly and safely as possible, as well as reaching a Gaza cease-fire deal that will bring all the hostages home,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Monday.

“The secretary made clear that the United States remains postured to protect U.S. forces and personnel and determined to deter any regional actors from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict,” the statement said.

About 40,000 American troops are stationed in the region on bases in Iraq, in Syria and in the Persian Gulf countries. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is in the Gulf of Oman, and a second aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, left Norfolk, Va., on Monday for the Mediterranean as part of a regularly scheduled deployment.

Tensions have significantly escalated this week between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported by Iran. Back-and-forth attacks have brought the two sides to the brink of their first full-scale war since 2006, when they fought a 34-day conflict that involved an Israeli ground invasion and the deaths of over 1,000 Lebanese and 150 Israelis.

In recent days, Israel has carried out a series of attacks on Hezbollah targets, raising concern in the Biden administration that retaliatory strikes by the group or its patron, Iran, could endanger U.S. troops in the region.