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Israeli forces have killed or wounded the equivalent of a classroom’s worth of children every day in Lebanon in the past two weeks of Israel’s escalation against the country, the UN’s children’s agency has reported.
Since Israel’s current escalation began on March 2, Israeli strikes have killed at least 111 children and wounded 334 in Lebanon, health officials report. That represents “a classroom of children every day,” Ted Chaiban, UNICEF’s deputy executive director, told Reuters.
Lebanon’s health ministry has reported that 968 people have been killed in Lebanon in the past weeks, as Israel has resumed intense bombardments of the country.
Reports said that Israel carried out a wave of attacks overnight on Wednesday, including a strike that collapsed a 10-story apartment building in Bashoura, a neighborhood in the heart of Beirut. Israeli forces also said that soldiers struck two bridges over the Litani River on Wednesday, cutting off key crossing points connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country.
Israel announced this week that it is expanding its ground invasion there in “targeted” incursions — though the current attacks and evacuation orders have forcibly displaced everyone in southern Lebanon. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz stated that the goal is that “hundreds of thousands” of residents of southern Lebanon “will not return” to their homes until northern Israel is “safe.”
One Israeli official pledged last week that Israel is planning a major ground invasion and will “do what we did in Gaza.”
Israeli forces have been conducting near-daily attacks since agreeing to a ceasefire deal in November 2024, violating the deal thousands of times, UN officials said. Israel began its current intensified bombardments when Hezbollah launched rockets and drones at Israel for the first time in over a year on March 2, in response to the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran.
In the past weeks of escalated attacks, 1 million people in Lebanon have been forcibly displaced, humanitarian groups and Lebanese officials say. This amounts to nearly one in five people in Lebanon, and includes 350,000 children, now uprooted from their homes, schools, and communities.
The children killed are among 1,200 children killed across the Middle East in recent weeks, Reuters reports. Children have “paid a terrible price” in the region’s wars, Chaiban said.
This includes nearly 200 children killed in Iran by Israeli and U.S. strikes, many of them in a likely U.S. strike on a school in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the war.
It also includes two young boys, aged 5 and 6, who were shot and killed by Israeli forces on Sunday while in their family car in the occupied West Bank. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the car without warning, killing the boys and their parents, and leaving behind two brothers, aged 8 and 11. Israeli forces reportedly blocked paramedics from reaching the family for half an hour, and brutalized one of the surviving children while they awaited medical help.
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