Israel warns Lebanon of 'heavy price' as week's death toll nears 300

Israel has warned Lebanon of a "very heavy price" if it did not rein in Hezbollah on Saturday, as it pounded the group's strongholds around the country with air strikes and mounted a deadly airborne raid in the east.

Lebanon was dragged into the wider Middle East war on Monday when Hezbollah fired at Israel, which responded with a new military campaign that has killed nearly 300 people and forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes.

In the southern suburbs of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah, buildings lay in mounds of smoking rubble and twisted metal, Reuters footage showed.

Further east, in the town of Nabi Chit, a heavy Israeli bombardment after a rare Israeli airborne raid had punched craters into the ground, burying cars in mountains of dirt and launching one vehicle onto the roof of a two-storey building.

RARE AIRBORNE RAID KILLS DOZENS

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, addressing Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in a statement, said that if the Lebanese government failed to enforce a 2024 agreement to disarm Hezbollah, it and the whole country would suffer.

"If the choice is between protecting our civilians and our soldiers or protecting the state of Lebanon - we will choose the protection of our civilians and soldiers, and the Lebanese government and Lebanon will pay a very heavy price," Katz said.

He said Israel had no territorial claims against Lebanon, but would not allow a situation where there could be fire targeting Israel from Lebanese territory.

Lebanon's government instructed the army last year to establish a state monopoly on arms. Troops had confiscated Hezbollah's weapons in parts of the south, but senior Lebanese officials and security sources said pursuing the plan could cause internal tensions as the group had refused to give up its arsenals in full.

An Israeli military official told Reuters that Israeli military operations were now acting "to remove the threat from Lebanon."

Overnight, Israeli helicopters dropped troops near the town of Nabi Chit in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.

Israel's military said the troops staged the operation to seek the remains of Ron Arad, an Israeli airforce navigator missing in Lebanon since 1986 but no findings related to him were recovered.

Hezbollah said overnight it had fired on Israeli troops dropped near Nabi Chit by four helicopters, and that the troops had withdrawn. The Israeli military said none of its forces were injured.

Lebanon's Health Ministry said 41 people had been killed in the last 24 hours in Israeli attacks in the Nabi Chit area. The Lebanese army said three of its personnel were among the dead.

Israeli strikes have killed 294 people and wounded more than 1,000 across Lebanon since Monday, the health ministry there said.

IRANIAN DIPLOMATS LEAVE BEIRUT

Shawki al-Masri, who lives in a town adjacent to Nabi Chit, described the overnight bombing in the area as "a night of hell".

"We heard the helicopters over our house all night - they were so low we thought they would land on us," he told Reuters.

Orders to evacuate have displaced around 300,000 people, only a third of whom are now living in government shelters. A senior United Nations official described the displacement as "unprecedented" in comments to Reuters on Friday.

Israel's military has issued orders for people living in a swathe of southern Lebanon, several towns in the east, and the entirety of Beirut's southern suburbs to leave their homes. This amounts to around 8 per cent of Lebanese territory.

Israel's military this week warned representatives of the Iranian government "still in Lebanon to leave immediately before they are targeted."

Over 150 Iranian nationals, including diplomats and their families, left Lebanon on Saturday, a senior Lebanese security source told Reuters, adding that 20 left the previous day.

Hezbollah has warned Israeli citizens living in communities near the border to flee their homes, but Katz said on Saturday they should not do so. Many northern Israeli communities were evacuated during cross-border bombardment in 2023-24.

The United Nations warned on Saturday warned that the conflict was set to get "even worse," and that talks between Israel and Lebanon "must be pursued with urgency" to end hostilities.