Israeli strikes hit south and east Lebanon on Sunday, state media reported, a day after 11 people were killed in a single raid on the south despite a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war. Saturday's strike in Sir al-Gharbiyeh "resulted in a massacre whose final toll is 11 dead including a child and six women, and nine wounded including four children and a woman," Lebanon's health ministry said in a statement. Israel's military has continued to strike what it says are Hezbollah targets in Lebanon despite a ceasefire that began on April 17 and that was recently extended for several weeks. The Iran-backed group has also maintained attacks on Israeli targets in southern Lebanon and across the border, including firing rockets on Sunday at Israeli troops operating on Lebanese territory. Lebanon's official National News Agency reported Israeli strikes on multiple locations in south and east Lebanon on Sunday, in some cases causing casualties. Some of the raids came before the Israeli military issued two evacuation warnings covering more than a dozen villages in Lebanon's south and the eastern Bekaa valley. An AFP correspondent saw large clouds of smoke rising after strikes on the south's Nabatieh and Zawtar al-Sharqiyah. Lebanon's civil defense agency said early on Sunday that its regional facility in Nabatieh had been destroyed by an overnight Israeli strike. An AFP photographer saw civil defense personnel recovering equipment and using a stretcher to remove oxygen bottles from the rubble. The Israeli army did not immediately provide any comment on the strike in response to an inquiry from AFP's Jerusalem bureau. - Iran - Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah, whom the US sanctioned this week, said Sunday that "major transformations are taking place in the region", amid anticipation that a US-Iranian agreement to end the Middle East war was close. Iran "has made its agreement with the United States conditional on stopping the war in Lebanon", he said, according to a statement. On Saturday, Hezbollah said its chief Naim Qassem had received a message from Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, saying Iran's latest proposal through Pakistani mediators emphasized "the demand to include Lebanon" in the broader ceasefire. Fadlallah said that "the war will not just stop in Iran, but across the whole region, particularly in Lebanon", urging Lebanese authorities to "take advantage of this regional umbrella... which will have repercussions on us". Lebanese authorities recently began landmark direct talks with Israel under US auspices, and have insisted the discussions must be independent from the Iran-US negotiations. Hezbollah drew Lebanon into the Middle East war on March 2 with rocket fire at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran's supreme leader in US-Israeli strikes. Under the terms of the ceasefire published by Washington, Israel reserves the right to act against "planned, imminent or ongoing attacks". Israeli troops who invaded Lebanon are also operating inside an Israeli-occupied "yellow line" running around 10 kilometers (six miles) deep along Lebanon's southern border.
