Health Ministry: Death toll from Israeli attacks on Lebanon surpasses 3,000

Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed more than 3,000 people in the 13 months of fighting between Hezbollah and Israeli forces along the border, the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health has said.

The ministry said late on Monday that 3,002 people were killed and 13,492 injured since the beginning of Israel’s “aggression” against Lebanon. There were 589 women and at least 185 children among the dead, it added.

While Israel claims that hundreds of Hezbollah fighters have been killed in its attacks, witnesses and independent reports from bombed communities across Lebanon attest to the high number of civilian casualties from widespread and indiscriminate Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling.

The United Nations children’s agency said last week that at least one child per day had been killed in the country over the past month.

The mounting death toll comes as an estimated 1.2 million of Lebanon’s population of 5.8 million have been forcibly displaced from cities, towns and villages as well as neighbourhoods in the capital, Beirut, which Israel has bombed repeatedly and continues to issue forced evacuation orders.

The UN agency for refugees (UNHCR) said an average of 400-600 people from Lebanon have been arriving in Iraq every day over the past week. Most of them are Lebanese, but there has also been an uptick in the arrival of Syrians and Palestinians.

At least 28,350 refugees from Lebanon arrived in the country since the escalation in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in September, the agency said. A majority of them are being hosted in Najaf and Karbala.