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BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese were surveying the damage on Monday after overnight Israeli strikes hit nearly a dozen branches of a Hezbollah-run financial institution that Israel says is used to fund attacks but where many ordinary people keep their savings.
The strikes targeted Al-Qard Al-Hassan branches in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, across southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley, where Hezbollah has a strong presence. One strike flattened a nine-story building in Beirut with a branch inside it. Smoke rose from several locations on Monday.
The Israeli military issued evacuation warnings ahead of the strikes. There were no reports of casualties.
Israel invaded Lebanon earlier this month, saying it aims to push Hezbollah from the border after more than a year of rocket, missile and drone attacks that began after Palestinian Hamas militants launched their surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Israeli airstrikes have pounded large areas of Lebanon for weeks, forcing over a million people to flee their homes.
The United States is hoping to revive diplomatic efforts to resolve both conflicts after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip last week, but so far all sides appear to be digging in.
The Arabic language spokesman for the Israeli military, Avichay Adraee, said warplanes targeted several locations “used to store money for the military arm of Hezbollah," including Al-Qard Al-Hassan, which he said finances arms purchases and is used to pay fighters.
He said Hezbollah stores hundreds of millions of dollars in the branches, without providing evidence, and that the strikes were aimed at preventing the group from rearming.
The institution has more than 30 branches across Lebanon. It tried to reassure customers, saying it had evacuated all branches and relocated gold and other deposits to safe areas.
Many customers are civilians unaffiliated with Hezbollah. The registered nonprofit, sanctioned by the United States and Saudi Arabia, has long served as an alternative to Lebanon's banks, which have imposed restrictions in the face of a severe financial crisis that began in 2019.
Bulldozers cleared mounds of rubble at the site of one strike. Clothes, furniture and the remains of a beauty salon were seen in the debris. Al-Qard al-Hassan documents were scattered across the area, but there was no sign of cash or other valuables.
U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who has spent much of the past year trying to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, was back in Lebanon on Monday for talks with senior officials.
He said U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, was “no longer enough” to ensure peace and a new mechanism was needed to enforce it.
The resolution called for Hezbollah to withdraw from the border with Israel and for U.N. peacekeepers and the Lebanese army to control southern Lebanon, without any Hezbollah or Israeli presence.
Israel says the resolution was never implemented and that Hezbollah built up extensive military infrastructure right up to the border. Lebanon has long accused Israel of violating its airspace and failing to abide by other provisions of the resolution.
“1701 was successful at ending the war in 2006, but we must be honest that nobody did anything to implement it,” Hochstein said after meeting with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a political ally of Hezbollah who is involved in cease-fire talks.
In a separate development, the Israeli military apologized for a strike on Sunday in southern Lebanon that killed three Lebanese army soldiers. It said it targeted a vehicle in an area that Hezbollah had recently used for attacks without realizing it belonged to the Lebanese military.
Lebanon’s army is a respected institution within the country, but it is not powerful enough to impose its will on Hezbollah or defend Lebanon from Israel’s invasion. The army has largely kept to the sidelines as Israel and Hezbollah have traded blows over the past year.
The United States has expressed hope that the killing of Hamas leader Sinwar could give new impetus for a cease-fire in Gaza, which would give a major boost to parallel efforts to halt the fighting in Lebanon.
The head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, Ronen Bar, visited Egypt for the second time in less than a week and had an hours-long meeting with Egyptian officials on Sunday, according to an Egyptian official who was not authorized to brief media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official said Egypt, a key mediator between Israel and Hamas, remains opposed to any Israeli presence along the Gaza-Egypt border, a key sticking point in talks that sputtered to a halt in August.
Hamas has said its demands remain unchanged after the killing of Sinwar. The militant group has said it will only release dozens of Israeli hostages in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, a lasting cease-fire and the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas and recover all the captives, and says Israel must maintain an open-ended security presence in Gaza to keep Hamas from re-arming.
Israel has been waging a major operation in northern Gaza, the hardest-hit part of the territory, for more than two weeks, and its forces have repeatedly returned to other areas of Gaza after saying Hamas had regrouped.
Palestinian medical officials said on Monday they collected over a dozen bodies of people killed in Israel’s ongoing air and ground operation in northern Gaza. They included six men killed early Monday when they were trying to get drinking water in the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, the main focus of the operation, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
Four others, including two women, were killed in a strike on an area sheltering displaced people in Jabaliya, the ministry said. Another three people were killed in a strike on a school-turned-shelter in the border town of Beit Hanoun.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants blew holes in Israel’s security fence and stormed in, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Around 100 captives are still being held in Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who don’t distinguish combatants from civilians but say most of the dead were women and children. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced about 90% of its population of 2.3 million people.
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Julia Frankel in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
