The Israeli military late on Sunday conducted a heavy barrage of airstrikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, with fighter jets racing across the skies above the Lebanese capital and deafening explosions ringing out for miles.
Lebanon’s state-run news agency described the bombardment as a “ring of fire,” with thick, black plumes of smoke seen rising above the city’s skyline.
The airstrikes followed a series of sweeping evacuation warnings on Sunday by the Israeli military for the area, known as the Dahiya — more warnings than in any other day this month.
Hezbollah fired about 250 projectiles into Israel on Sunday. Both sides appear to be intensifying their attacks ahead of a potential cease-fire deal.
There were no immediate reports of casualties. The Dahiya, once a bustling cluster of neighborhoods that are home to hundreds of thousands of people, has been almost entirely emptied in recent weeks because of intense airstrikes.
The Israeli military said in a statement late on Sunday that it struck 12 “command centers” in the Dahiya that it said belonged to Hezbollah, including those attached to the group’s intelligence unit and a unit “responsible for weapons smuggling from Iran through Syria into Lebanon.”
Rescuers were still searching through rubble on Sunday from an earlier Israeli strike that killed 29 people in central Beirut, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health.
The intensified strikes near Lebanon’s capital came as negotiators from the United States have been pushing a cease-fire agreement to end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli troops also pushed deeper into southern Lebanon on Sunday, issuing evacuation warnings for five villages there.
The terms for a cease-fire appear to be taking shape, according to several regional and U.S. officials briefed on the diplomacy. Last week, a top American envoy on the conflict, Amos Hochstein, traveled to Lebanon and Israel to advance the talks.
Israeli airstrikes over the past two months have decimated Hezbollah’s leadership, severely degraded its military capabilities and displaced over a million people in Lebanon. That has pushed the group’s remaining leaders, and their backers in Iran, toward interest in an agreement that could stop further damage, according to officials who speak with the group.
In a video address on Wednesday, Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, said his group had made some comments on the proposed agreement, showing that “we have agreed to this path of indirect negotiation.”
Hezbollah’s two conditions, he said, were that an agreement would stop all Israeli attacks on Lebanon and preserve Lebanese sovereignty.
Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September in response to almost a year of near-daily rocket attacks on northern Israel. Hezbollah said the attacks were in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, in Gaza. The war has become the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.
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