By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
A two-month-old infant did not survive the night.
Lebanese state media — a government source with a direct stake in how this war is narrated, and the only sourcing available to us for these figures — reported that Israeli air attacks overnight killed at least 10 people in southern Lebanon, among them children, according to Al Jazeera. A separate report from the BBC, also citing Lebanese state media, put the toll from strikes on a southern Lebanese village at 11 dead. It has not been determined whether these two figures describe the same incident, overlapping incidents, or two distinct strikes; we could not reconcile them from the material available, and casualty counts from active strike zones often shift as bodies are recovered. Readers should treat the precise numbers as provisional and government-sourced, pending independent confirmation.
What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. Lebanon's government says the renewed strikes jeopardize a ceasefire, brokered by the United States, that was meant to end the war between Israel and the armed group Hezbollah. That truce has been fraying for months in a familiar pattern: sporadic Israeli strikes described by Israel as targeting Hezbollah operatives or infrastructure, and Lebanese officials countering that civilians, including children, are paying the price.
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment.
The stakes are not abstract. A ceasefire that exists on paper but not on the ground leaves southern Lebanon's villages exposed to exactly this kind of night — and leaves Washington's brokered peace looking, once again, like a pause rather than an end.
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera and BBC World.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."