At least five people were killed in Israeli attacks on towns in southern Lebanon on December 11, according to the country's health ministry, adding fresh casualties to a ceasefire that had already become brittle barely two weeks after it took effect.
The ministry said an Israeli drone strike on Ainata killed one person and wounded another. A separate strike on Bint Jbeil killed three people, while a third strike on Beit Lif killed one person. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the attacks in the supplied reporting.
The strikes came as diplomats and military officials were still trying to make the truce work. The US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah began on November 27 after more than 13 months of fighting, but both sides had already accused the other of repeated violations. Israel continued near-daily strikes, mostly in southern Lebanon, while the agreement called for Hezbollah to pull back north of the Litani River and for Israeli forces to withdraw over 60 days.
On the same day, the Lebanese army said it had deployed troops around Khiam, a key border town that had seen heavy Israeli strikes and fighting. The army said specialised units would later survey the town to remove unexploded ordnance. UN peacekeepers had entered the area to verify Israeli withdrawal, according to Lebanon's state-run news agency.
The wider political context was also shifting. The supplied report said ambassadors from the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt met Lebanon's parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri in Beirut, part of an ongoing effort to help end a presidential vacuum that had left the country without a head of state for more than two years. US Central Command chief Gen. Erik Kurilla separately met the head of the Lebanese army to discuss support for the ceasefire's implementation.
For residents in the south, however, the diplomatic traffic did little to slow the immediate danger. The attacks on Ainata, Bint Jbeil and Beit Lif showed that even a formal truce had not stopped deadly strikes on populated areas. Each new incident complicated the deployment of Lebanese troops and peacekeepers, while reinforcing fears that the border could slip back into wider confrontation.
The event date figures in the report fit a pattern of recurring violence: the truce had reduced the scale of the war, but it had not ended it. On December 11, the central fact was the same one that had defined the preceding days and weeks: the ceasefire existed on paper, but civilians in southern Lebanon were still being killed by air attacks.
