Dozens more people have been killed in Lebanon in major Israeli air and ground operations, as the war with the Iran-backed group Hezbollah continues to escalate.
Overnight, one Israeli operation in a town in the eastern Bekaa Valley – a focal point of the rising hostilities – saw at least 41 people killed and 40 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Three Lebanese soldiers were among the dead, and locals listed the names of civilians, including children, they said had been killed.
The focus of the operation in Nabi Chit was recovering the remains of an Israeli military airman who went missing in Lebanon 40 years ago.
On Saturday, there was a hole in the ground in the corner of the town cemetery where a grave had been dug up.
“They thought he was there but there was nothing,” one local man said, gesturing at the empty grave.
Elsewhere in the town, bullet holes were scattered across a destroyed car and its seats were stained red with blood.
Around the area, buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble and a huge crater had been blown into the ground, damaging the surrounding houses.
Signs of civilian life, including a children’s colouring book, paintings and cooking utensils, were among the debris.
Hezbollah – which is the main force in the area – allowed journalists into the town to see the scale of the destruction.
The Shia militia and political group is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK, US and others.
The Lebanese military said it had observed four Israeli aircraft appear by Lebanon’s border with Syria late on Friday night, with two of them landing and deploying special forces soldiers onto the ground.
A “large-scale aerial bombardment” began at the same time, it said.
The Lebanese military, which has sought to distance itself from the war between Hezbollah and Israel, said its units then carried out “immediate alert and defence measures”, using flare bombs to detect the landing spot.
In Nabi Chit, clashes then broke out on the streets between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters, and civilians defending their homes.
“At midnight, we felt a strange movement on one side of the village. It turned out to be an Israeli commando unit deployed for some mission,” a local official said at the site of one major explosion.
“The resistance then surrounded them and heavy clashes ensued. Then the air force increased their air strikes to allow the extraction of their unit which caused tremendous damage”.
Hezbollah and local residents said Israel had conducted some 40 airstrikes in the area to give cover to the special forces soldiers and allow them to withdraw.
Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Organization.
The Lebanese army chief later confirmed this to local media, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not respond to BBC requests for comment about this allegation.
The town is covered by sweeping Israeli evacuation orders, and locals say a further call for civilians to leave their homes came shortly before the operation began.
Mohamed Chokr, whose uncle and other relatives were among those killed, said he and his family had felt relatively safe because they knew there was nothing related to Hezbollah inside their homes.
“My uncle is a retired soldier, his son is also a retired soldier and his other son is a school teacher. We are not affiliated with any political party. We are Shia – we like Hezbollah, but we are not members of Hezbollah. We are all in the Lebanese army,” he said.
“How should I feel today? This is my uncle and his kids and their kids.”
He said another relative who arrived in a bulldozer to try to rescue the family from beneath the rubble had also been killed in the crossfire as clashes broke out on the streets.
Another local also gave Mohamed’s uncle’s name and those of other relatives as he listed people killed in the community.
The Israeli military has not responded to BBC requests for comment.
Locals who were in the town at the time of the military operation, and others who had been staying elsewhere, gathered around the large crater on Saturday to assess the damage and make sense of what had happened.
“They bombed everything. This is crazy,” said Ali Shakur.
“I think they were surprised by who was here because when they bombed they thought that everyone had evacuated.”
Another man in the town said people had evacuated their children but others had stayed, believing that any strikes would be similar to ones they had experienced before.
“Usually they hit two or three houses but [this] was different. It was non-stop. You can see how big it was,” he said. “But we are a resistance here and we resisted.”
A woman walking around the destroyed houses screamed: “Israel is attacking us unjustly. We are Hezbollah and we will prevail.”
The Israeli military said no IDF personnel had been injured in the overnight operation.
It added that it would “continue to operate relentlessly, day and night, out of a deep commitment to bringing all of Israel’s sons, the fallen and the missing, back home”.
But Ron Arad’s widow Tami urged Israel’s leaders not to put IDF soldiers’ lives at risk.
“We understand that our words until now have not been understood by the decision-makers and therefore it’s important for us to clarify: Our desire to know what happened to Ron stops as soon as there is risk to IDF soldiers,” she wrote on Facebook.
“In our eyes, the sanctity of life comes before the commitment to return the remains of a fighter for burial.”
In a separate statement on Saturday, the IDF said overnight strikes in the south of Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley had hit Hezbollah weapons and “military sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation”.
It did not respond to BBC requests for comment about the targets of the strikes around Nabi Chit.
Across Lebanon, at least 294 people have been killed by Israeli military action since Monday, according to the health ministry.
In the town, as some grieved, others said they felt victorious after fighting back and discovering Israel had failed to recover the remains.
“They came standing but we made them leave lying down,” one man said.
