People gather near ambulances outside the hospital where they brought victims of the Israeli attack on the Ein al-Hilwe refugee camp in Lebanon’s southern port city of Sidon on Tuesday.
Mohammed Zaatari/AP
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Mohammed Zaatari/AP
SIDON, Lebanon – An Israeli airstrike on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Tuesday killed 13 people and wounded several others, state media and government officials said. It was the deadliest attack on Lebanon since a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war a year ago.
The state-run National News Agency said the drone strike hit a car in the parking lot of a mosque in the Ein al-Hilwe refugee camp on the outskirts of the coastal city of Sidon. The Lebanese Health Ministry said 13 people were killed and several others were injured in the airstrike, without giving further details.
Hamas fighters in the area prevented journalists from reaching the scene, as ambulances rushed to evacuate the injured and dead.
The Israeli military said it attacked a Hamas training compound that was being used to prepare for attacks against Israel and its forces. It added that Israeli forces will continue operations against Hamas wherever the group operates.
Hamas condemned the attack in a statement, saying that the attack took place on a playground and denying that it was a training complex.
Over the past two years, Israeli air strikes on Lebanon have killed several officials from the militant Hezbollah group as well as Palestinian factions such as Hamas.
Saleh Arouri, Hamas’s deputy political chief and founder of the group’s military wing, was killed in a drone strike on a southern suburb of Beirut on January 2, 2024. Several other Hamas officials have been killed in attacks since then.
Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, thousands of Palestinians were killed due to Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
A day after the Israel–Hamas war began, Hezbollah began firing rockets toward Israeli positions along the border. Israel responded with shelling and airstrikes in Lebanon, and the two sides locked in an escalating conflict that escalated into a full-scale war in late September 2024.
That war, the latest of several conflicts involving Hezbollah over the past four decades, has killed more than 4,000 people in Lebanon, including hundreds of thousands of civilians, and caused an estimated $11 billion in destruction, according to the World Bank. 127 people including 80 soldiers died in Israel.
The war ended with a US-brokered ceasefire in late November 2024. Since then, Israel has carried out several airstrikes in Lebanon, saying Hezbollah is trying to rebuild its capabilities.
Lebanon’s health ministry has reported more than 270 people killed and about 850 injured in Israeli military actions since the ceasefire.