People inspect damage at the site of an overnight Israeli airstrike that targeted a branch of the Al-Qard Al-Hassan financial group in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Monday.

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TEL AVIV, Israel and BEIRUT – The Israeli army carried out airstrikes overnight on targets in Lebanon that the military says are linked to a financial institution supporting the militant group Hezbollah. Lebanon is assessing the damage.

Late on Sunday, an Israeli military spokesman published online messages in Arabic ordering Lebanese citizens to leave specific buildings housing branches of the bank, called Al-Qard Al-Hassan.

While United Nations representatives said the warnings caused panic in parts of the Lebanese capital Beirut, Israel’s foreign minister said 15 buildings were hit and that the army would continue attacking Hezbollah.

The US has long sanctioned Al-Qard Al-Hassan, saying it is used to manage finances by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militia and political movement that the US labels a terrorist organization.

A senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to detail the attack plans before they were carried out, told reporters on Sunday that Israel planned the attacks across Lebanon against several departments of the institution that act as banks to support Hezbollah. help finance. the official mentioned the organization’s “economic strongholds.”

But the official also acknowledged that while Al-Qard Al-Hassan is used in part to pay Hezbollah fighters and buy weapons, it has also served hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens – the majority of whom came from the country’s Shia Muslim communities – who simply used the weapons. system for their own banking needs. The intention was to create distrust between Hezbollah and those ordinary Shiite bank customers, the official said.

Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, wrote on social media that Al-Qard Al-Hassan was a “microfinance institution” modeled after the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. She said the Lebanese institution “provides small loans to low-income individuals against specific assets” – allowing women in some cases to offer their jewelry as collateral, in a country where the mainstream internationally connected banking system has repeatedly collapsed.

Ihab Hamadeh, a member of the Lebanese parliament affiliated with Hezbollah’s political wing, emphasized that the group did not benefit from Al-Qard Al-Hassan. He said the financial institution offers services to all Lebanese consumers and has awarded some 5,000 scholarships to university students abroad. “We tell the savers at Al-Qard Al-Hassan that you will not lose a cent,” he wrote on Telegram.

Israeli military warnings on social media before the attacks informed residents of specific buildings in southern Beirut and the Bekaa Valley that they were “near facilities and interests linked to Hezbollah.” Those inside the marked buildings were told to evacuate immediately and stay at least 500 meters away “for your safety and the safety of your family members.”

Some Lebanese news outlets and social media posts subsequently suggested that a hospital in the city of Baalbek had been evacuated due to its proximity to an attack on an Al-Qard Al-Hassan branch. But at one statement The Lebanese Ministry of Health denied thisand said the hospital was functioning normally. It was explained that following the Israeli threats, several patients had been moved alone from rooms overlooking the Al-Qard Al-Hassan branch next to the hospital.

Smoke rises from the scene of an Israeli airstrike that targeted an area on the outskirts of the eastern Lebanese city of Baalbek on Monday.

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Nidal Solh/AFP via Getty Images

“Beirut in flames,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote on social media. “Hezbollah has paid and will continue to pay a heavy price for its attacks on northern Israel and its rocket fire.”

Hezbollah is partially funded and significantly supported by the government of Iran, and Katz said Israeli forces would “continue to attack the Iranian proxy until it collapses.”

Precise details of the fatalities and injuries resulting from the strikes overnight into Monday have not yet been confirmed. Lebanon’s National News Agency said the attacks on at least one of the financial departments caused damage to other floors in the same building, as well as neighboring buildings, including nearby shops. And in the city of Tyre, the agency reported that “severe damage to surrounding houses” and to a nearby radio station resulted from the attack on one branch.

Across Lebanon, the Health Ministry recorded 16 deaths and 59 injuries on Saturday, many of them in the south of the country, close to the border with Israel. This brings the total death toll since the start of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah last October to 2,464.

In northern Israel, the latest figures from the Israeli government show that a total of 59 people were killed and 569 injured in the same period.

A drone sent by Iran’s state news agency Hezbollah from Lebanon targeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s family home in the northern city of Caesarea, according to the prime minister’s office. It was described in a social media post by Netanyahu’s wife Sara as an “attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister of Israel” and “an attack on all of us – on the people of Israel.”

US presidential envoy Amos Hochstein arrived in Beirut on Monday to meet with the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri.

For months, Hochstein has been tasked by the White House to calm the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. But ahead of its arrival in the Lebanese capital, the Israeli army had announced new ground attacks in southern Lebanon, killing fighters and dismantling anti-tank missiles, RPG launchers and other explosives, an Israeli military statement said. According to the Israeli military, two dozen rockets crossed the border from Lebanon into northern Israel on Monday morning, after about 200 on Sunday.

Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv, Israel; Arezou Rezvani from Beirut; Willem Marx from London.
Jawad Rizkallah contributed reporting from Beirut.