President Emmanuel Macron pressed for an emergency session of the UN Security Council, set for Monday, and demanded the fighting stop, warning that “nothing justifies the major escalation under way.” Diplomatic sources described the session as a direct response to Israel’s expanding offensive.
Behind the public alarm runs a quieter track. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by phone over the weekend with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and with Netanyahu, pushing a sequence Washington has laid out in plain terms: Hezbollah stops all attacks on Israel, and in return Israel refrains from escalating in Beirut. A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the militants must be the ones to move first. Military delegations from both countries met in Washington on Friday, and another round of American-brokered talks is expected within days. That Friday session produced no pause in the fighting; the weekend only widened it.
The war itself is barely three months old. Lebanon was pulled into it on March 2, when Hezbollah fired rockets toward Israel in retaliation for the US-Israeli killing of Iran’s supreme leader, and the exchanges have widened steadily since. The killing detonated a regional crisis that has not eased.
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The weekend’s cost fell hardest on civilians. Eight people died in a strike on Deir Zahrani in the south on Sunday, three of them women, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. A separate strike near a hospital in Tyre wounded 13 staff members. As the advance on Beaufort closed in, the Israeli military ordered a sweeping evacuation of the band of territory between the Zahrani and Litani rivers, roughly 40 kilometers from the border, emptying towns that had only begun to refill.
In a shelter in Sidon, the largest city in the south, Zeinab Fakih sat among the displaced from Nabatieh. “We are afraid,” she said. Her home is unreachable, she added, the city around it reduced to ruin — the sight of Israeli forces at the castle, to her, a tragedy.
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Hezbollah pressed its own account of the day. The group said it struck Israeli forces near the fortress and hit positions in Shlomi and Nahariya inside northern Israel, where air raid sirens wailed near Acre. The Israeli army countered that an explosive drone killed one of its soldiers on Saturday — the 25th military death it has logged in Lebanon since early March — and said 900 Hezbollah fighters have been killed since the ceasefire nominally took hold.
Lebanon’s health ministry counts a far heavier toll: more than 3,412 people killed across the country since the start of March.
In Tyre, a few thousand residents still hold on in the old city, a pocket left off the evacuation maps, some of them sleeping in their cars. Everywhere else, the region has drained out. On Sunday even the rescuers pulled back — civil defense crews from Tyre relocated to Sidon on the army’s orders, the men who pull survivors from the rubble now counted among those with nowhere left to stand.