Israeli military raids have killed at least seven people in Lebanon, including a child and two elderly people, Lebanese state media reported on Sunday, as fighting between Israel and the militant group Hezbollah persisted.

A child, a woman and two elderly people were killed in the town of Sahmar, in the Bekaa Valley, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA). Further south, two Palestinian people were killed in the Rashidieh refugee camp, in Tyre, Lebanon, NNA reported.

The Israel Defense Forces told CNN it was “not familiar with any IDF activity in these places” since midnight Sunday local time.

After hostilities flared between Israel and Hezbollah in early March, Palestinian communities in refugee camps along Lebanon’s south have been among those “most exposed to military activity,” according to the nonprofit American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera).

About 222,000 Palestinians are estimated to live in Lebanon today, Anera said in a report published on Thursday. Many started to settle there during al-Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” of 1948, Anera added, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly expelled from their homes following the 1948/49 war, in what is now Israel.

People staying in refugee camps around Tyre, including Rashidieh, Burj El Shemali and El Buss, have faced “recurring insecurity, nearby strikes and periods of isolation,” the Anera report said. “For Palestinian communities already living under prolonged precarity, the war has stripped away any sense of security,” the report added.

Source: CNN

– Agencies