Israeli attacks in northern Gaza and eastern Lebanon killed more than 150 people on October 29, 2024, according to reporting compiled by Al Jazeera.
The packet says at least 93 Palestinians were killed when an Israeli attack flattened a five-storey residential building in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. The head of Gaza's Government Media Office said the building housed displaced people. Al Jazeera also reported that at least 60 people were killed overnight in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
The humanitarian context was severe in both places. Northern Gaza had been under an Israeli siege since early October, while the wider war had intensified pressure on the enclave's remaining civilians. Dr Hussam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said more than 150 dead and wounded arrived after the Beit Lahiya strike, warning that many of the injured may die because of shortages of resources.
The report says the United States asked Israel to explain the strike, which State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller described as horrifying. Washington said it wanted to know exactly what happened and how a result reported to have killed dozens of children could have occurred.
In Lebanon, the Ministry of Public Health reported at least 60 dead and 58 injured in the overnight attacks. The highest death toll was reported in Sahl Allak in Baalbek province, where 16 people were killed. In Ramm, also in Baalbek, an air strike killed nine people, including a mother and her four children, according to Lebanon's National News Agency.
The reporting packet says Baalbek Mayor Bachir Khodr called it the most violent day in Baalbek since the beginning of the aggression, adding that people remained trapped under rubble. Those remarks point to the scale of destruction, even as the exact final death toll in both Gaza and Lebanon may continue to shift as rescuers search collapsed buildings and hospitals count arrivals.
The strikes also came as ceasefire diplomacy stalled. The packet says talks had resumed in Qatar but were not expected to produce a breakthrough, while Israel was moving to halt the operations of UNRWA, the UN agency that remains the main lifeline for many Palestinians in Gaza.
The combined toll shows how the war was spreading destruction across multiple fronts at once. In Gaza, the strike hit civilians sheltering in a residential building. In Lebanon, overnight bombardment hit towns in the Bekaa Valley and added to a mounting civilian death toll that local officials described in increasingly urgent terms.
