The Guardian reports:

At least 492 people have been killed and 1,645 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry has said, after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on alleged Hezbollah targets that left the country with its highest daily death toll since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

Tens of thousands of people fled from south Lebanese towns and villages along the main road towards the capital, Beirut, in Israel’s most intense barrage in nearly a year of cross-border clashes, as sirens were also heard in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. The Lebanese health ministry said 35 children and 58 women were among those killed.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said the military was changing the “security balance” along its northern border. “I promised we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north – and that is exactly what we are doing,” the Israeli prime minister told a security meeting on Monday. [Continue reading…]

The Intercept reports:

With this new bombing campaign, Israel has opened a new front in its wars on Gaza and the West Bank — and critics of U.S. policy have renewed calls for the U.S. to halt its weapons transfers to Israel as the conflict continues to grow.

“It’s easier to stop sending the Israel government weapons to conduct its genocidal wars than it is to evacuate every American in Lebanon,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., on X on Monday, captioning a tweet from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, urging American citizens to leave the country.

Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the “Uncommitted” movement, which has been pushing the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris’s campaign to commit to an arms embargo on Israel, reported Monday morning that his family’s village in Lebanon had been hit by Israeli bombs, killing “a mom and her daughters … in their home,” as well as other civilians in his cousins’ village.

“[President Joe Biden], the more weapons you send, the more civilians killed,” Alawieh wrote. [Continue reading…]