Israeli airstrikes killed at least six people in attacks on southern Lebanon on Monday, as right-wing cabinet ministers pressed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize broader military action against Hezbollah following a wave of drone attacks that struck northern Israel over the weekend.
The renewed hostilities pushed the casualty toll from three months of collapsed ceasefire negotiations past 3,000 dead, according to Lebanese authorities. The strikes came hours after Hezbollah launched a coordinated drone attack on an Israeli military base near Haifa, wounding at least two soldiers in one of the deepest penetrations of Israeli airspace since the March 2 resumption of fighting.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel would “expand the scale of responses” while military chiefs assessed additional target sets, according to a statement from his office. The escalation followed a weekend in which Hezbollah claimed credit for six separate drone launches against Israeli positions, testing air defense systems that have struggled to intercept the low-flying munitions at scale.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said through a spokesperson that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory remained “non-negotiable,” rejecting demands that Lebanese state authority be confined to areas south of the Litani River as a precondition for any talks. He spoke as civil defense crews worked to extract bodies from the rubble of at least two residential structures struck in the Nabatieh district.
The White House said it was “tracking events closely” but offered no new diplomatic initiative to interrupt the escalation. State Department spokesman Chad Montro said the United States continued to believe a negotiated outcome was achievable, though no envoy has been dispatched to the region since April.
Hezbollah’s acting leader, Hashem Safieddine, said in a recorded statement that the group was prepared for “long attrition” and accused Israel of using the collapsed ceasefire to pursue territory rather than address the group’s stated grievances. Israeli officials have denied that framing and said any settlement must permanently neutralize the threat from Lebanon’s south.
Emergency summits are being arranged by Egypt and Qatar for later this week, according to diplomatic sources in Cairo, though officials cautioned that both sides have shown limited willingness to accept outside mediation on terms acceptable to the other party.