CBS News
Israel airstrikes rock parts of Lebanon as Hezbollah launch rockets at air base near Haifa
The escalating fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continued Saturday as both sides traded strikes as the war in Gaza nears one year.
The Israel Defense Forces said its air force struck Hezbollah fighters inside a mosque in southern Lebanon that they said was used as a command center to “plan and execute terrorist attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel.”
The mosque was adjacent to Salah Ghandour Hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil. The hospital said in a statement that Israeli forces had shelled it after being warned to evacuate. The shelling “resulted in nine members of the medical and nursing staff being injured, most of them seriously,” while most of the medical staff were evacuated. On Thursday, the World Health Organization said 28 health workers in Lebanon had been killed in the past 24 hours.
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At the same time, 12 Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, including one that badly damaged a large hall Hezbollah used to hold ceremonies, Lebanon’s state news agency said.
Later in the day, more strikes hit the area, from which tens of thousands of people have fled over the past two weeks.
Israeli airstrikes also hit areas in southern and eastern Lebanon, according to state media. At least six people were killed, according to NNA.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah said it launched a series of rockets at an Israeli air base near Haifa, about 30 miles from the Lebanese border. Israeli police said fragments of interceptors fell in several sites but no injuries were reported, according to the Associated Press.
Israel has sharply expanded its strikes on Lebanon in recent weeks after nearly a year of exchanging fire with the Iran-backed Hezbollah — long designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel and many other nations. The IDF has been carrying out nightly bombardment of Beirut’s once densely populated southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hezbollah. Overnight, a military spokesman issued three alerts for residents there to evacuate.
Houssam Shbaro/Anadolu via Getty Images
Nearly a week of Israeli ground operations in southern Lebanon, near Israel’s northern border, and two weeks of airstrikes in that region and in southern Beirut — both Hezbollah strongholds — had killed more than 2,000 people, the health ministry said. More than 1 million people have been driven from their homes, including tens of thousands under Israel evacuation orders in almost 100 towns and villages near the border.
Hezbollah started launching those attacks in support of its ideological ally Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, the day after Hamas sparked the ongoing war in Gaza with its Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The IDF says Hezbollah militants have fired over 10,000 rockets across the border since Oct. 8, 2023. The vast majority of them have been intercepted by Israel’s advanced missile defense systems.
Israel conducts more ground raids
The Israeli military said on Saturday its special forces were carrying out ground raids against Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon, destroying missiles, launchpads, watchtowers and weapons storage facilities. The military said troops also dismantled tunnel shafts that Hezbollah used to approach the Israeli border.
Some 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes since Israel escalated its strikes in late September aiming to cripple Hezbollah and push it away from the countries’ shared border. On Tuesday, Israel launched what it calls a limited ground operation into southern Lebanon.
Nine Israeli troops have been killed in close fighting in the area in the past few days, which is saturated with arms and explosives, the military said.
Americans attempt to leave Lebanon
The U.S. government has warned Americans not to travel to Lebanon since mid-September and urged any citizens in the country to leave via commercial travel routes. As of Friday night, the U.S. State Department has assisted approximately 500 U.S. citizens, permanent residents and their families to leave Lebanon on flights organized by the agency.
Other nations are also working to evacuate their residents from Lebanon. Germany has evacuated 460 citizens on German military flights, while a Dutch military transport plane carried more than 100 citizens out of Lebanon. There were also citizens of Belgium, Finland and Ireland who were repatriated on that flight.
ROB ENGELAAR/ANP/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s great that these people are safely back in the Netherlands. These have been tense times for them,” Christiaan Rebergen, secretary-general of the foreign ministry, said after they landed Friday.
Fighting ongoing in Gaza
Palestinian medical officials say Israeli strikes in northern and central Gaza early Saturday have killed at least nine people, including two children.
One strike hit a group of people in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, killing at least five people, including two children, according to the Health Ministry’s Ambulance and Emergency service.
Another strike hit a house in the northern part of Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least four people, the Awda hospital said. The strike also left a number of wounded people, it said.
The Israeli military did not have any immediate comment on the strikes but has long accused Hamas of operating from within civilian areas.
Earlier in the day, the Israeli military had warned residents in parts of central Gaza to evacuate, saying its forces would soon operate there in response to Palestinian militants.
The warnings cover areas along a strategic corridor in central Gaza, which was at the heart of obstacles to a ceasefire deal earlier this summer. The military warned Palestinians in areas of Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, located along the Netzarim corridor, to evacuate to an along Gaza’s shore called Muwasi, which the military has designated a humanitarian zone. It’s unclear how many Palestinians are currently living in the areas affected by the order, parts of which were evacuated previously.
Almost 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the almost year-long war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.
Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves made his professional auto racing debut on Saturday at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“The Matrix” star, who qualified 31st out of 35 cars, ran as high as 21st before a single-car crash a little more than halfway through the 45-minute race briefly stopped him in his tracks.
Darron Cummings / AP
The 60-year-old spun into the grass without a collision on the exit of Turn 9 when he had about 21 minutes of racing left. He re-entered the course and continued driving, signaling he was uninjured.
Reeves finished 25th.
The actor is competing at Indianapolis in the Toyota GR Cup, a Toyota spec-racing series and a support series for this weekend’s Indy 8 Hour sports car event. He has a second race on Sunday.
Darron Cummings / AP
He is driving the No. 92 BRZRKR car, which is promoting his graphic novel “The Book of Elsewhere.” He is teammates with Cody Jones from “Dude Perfect.”
Reeves has previous racing experience as a former participant in the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in the celebrity race. Reeves won the event in 2009.
A passenger successfully landed a small plane on Friday after the pilot had a medical emergency, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 was traveling from Henderson Executive Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada to Monterey Regional Airport in California, with a pilot and one other person on board, the FAA said.
The pilot suffered an unspecified medical emergency while flying, the FAA said, forcing the passenger to take the controls and make an emergency landing at Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California.
The Kern Fire Department told CBS News affiliate KBAX that firefighters were called to a report of a medical emergency on the plane. The pilot was reported to be “incapacitated,” the fire department said. Firefighters saw the plane approach and land safely, then “chased” the plane down the runway in emergency vehicles to meet it.
The FAA did not release the passenger or pilot’s identities nor give an update on the pilot’s condition. The pilot was taken to an area hospital by ambulance. The passenger did not report any injuries.
The FAA and the National Transportation Security Board will investigate the incident, the FAA said.
Congolese authorities began vaccination against mpox on Saturday, nearly two months after the disease outbreak that spread from Congo to several African countries and beyond was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.
The 265,000 doses donated to Congo by the European Union and the U.S. were rolled out in the eastern city of Goma in North Kivu province, where hospitals and health workers have been overstretched, struggling to contain the new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox.
Congo, with about 30,000 suspected mpox cases and 859 deaths, accounts for more than 80% of all the cases and 99% of all the deaths reported in Africa this year. All of the Central African nation’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases. Officials in Congo previously told CBS News that they’ve struggled to diagnose patients and provide basic care in the vast country of 100 million people, where a fragile, under-resourced healthcare system is also burdened by the stigma associated with the virus.
Although most mpox infections and deaths recorded in Congo are in children under age 15, the doses being administered are only meant for adults and will be given to at-risk populations and front-line workers, Health Minister Roger Kamba said this week.
“Strategies have been put in place by the services in order to vaccinate all targeted personnel,” Muboyayi ChikayaI, the minister’s chief of staff, said as he kicked off the vaccination.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
At least 3 million doses of the vaccine approved for use in children are expected from Japan in the coming days, Kamba said.
Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 global outbreak that saw wealthy countries quickly respond with vaccines from their stockpiles while Africa received only a few doses despite pleas from its governments.
However, unlike the global outbreak in 2022 that was overwhelmingly focused on gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups, Dr. Dimie Ogoina, the chair of WHO’s mpox emergency committee, recently told reporters.
More than 34,000 suspected cases and 866 deaths from the virus have been recorded across 16 countries in Africa this year. That is a 200% increase compared to the same period last year, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
A lack of diagnostic materials and basic medicines to treat the virus, which can improve survival rates, have also hampered efforts to contain the outbreak, and access to vaccines remains a challenge.
Moses Sawasawa / AP
The continent of 1.4 billion people has only secured a commitment for 5.9 million doses of mpox vaccines, expected to be available from October through December, Dr. Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa CDC, told reporters last week. Congo remains a priority, he said.
At the vaccination drive in Goma, Dr Jean Bruno Kibunda, the WHO representative, warned that North Kivu province is at a risk of a major outbreak due to the “promiscuity observed in the camps” for displaced people, as one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis caused by armed violence unfolds there.
The news of the vaccination program brought relief to many in Congo, especially in hospitals that had been struggling to manage the outbreak. Doctors with several charities working in the country have told CBS News they’re overstretched and short on supplies, even having to use tents and mattresses on the floor of makeshift isolation wards to treat a constant influx of patients.
“If everyone could be vaccinated, it would be even better to stop the spread of the disease,” said Dr. Musole Mulambamunva Robert, the medical director of Kavumu Hospital, one of the mpox treatment centers in eastern Congo.
Eastern Congo has been beset by conflict for years, with more than 100 armed groups vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich area near the border with Rwanda. Some have been accused of carrying out mass killings.
