Israel said it attacked hundreds of Hezbollah targets on Monday in airstrikes which Lebanese authorities reported killed at least 274 people in Lebanon's deadliest day in decades, ramping up nearly a year of conflict between Israel and its Iran-backed enemy.
After some of the heaviest cross-border exchanges of fire since the hostilities flared, Israel warned people in Lebanon to evacuate areas where it said the armed movement was storing weapons.
After almost a year of war against Hamas in Gaza on its southern border, Israel is shifting its focus to its northern frontier, from where Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel in support of its ally Hamas.
Israel's military on Monday struck Hezbollah in Lebanon's south, eastern Bekaa valley and northern region near Syria in its most widespread strikes.
Lebanon's health minister said 274 people were killed, including 21 children and 39 women, and 1,024 were wounded in Israel's strikes in what one Lebanese official said was the highest death toll since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel faced "complicated days" as it stepped up attacks in southern Lebanon and called on Israelis to stay united as the campaign unfolded.
"I promised that we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north - that is exactly what we are doing," he said in a message following a situational assessment at military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Earlier, Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the actions would continue until "we achieve our goal to return the northern residents safely to their homes," setting the stage for a long conflict as Hezbollah has vowed to fight on until there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
The Israeli military said it had struck about 800 targets connected to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the area of the Bekaa valley. "Among the targets struck were buildings where Hezbollah hid rockets, missiles, launchers, UAVs and additional terrorist infrastructure," the military said in a statement.
Reuters could not independently verify Israel's allegation that Hezbollah had stored weapons in homes and villages.
Hezbollah has not commented on the Israeli claims it hid weapons in houses, but it has said it does not place military infrastructure near civilians. In response to the strikes, Hezbollah said it had launched dozens of missiles at a military base in northern Israel.
MORE AIRSTRIKES EXPECTED
Warning sirens sounded in the northern part of the occupied West Bank on Monday as Hezbollah rocket fire extended further south from the border areas in northern Israel, which have been most heavily attacked in the latest exchange of fire.
Alarms were also sounded in areas across northern Israel, including in the port city of Haifa, the military said.
More attacks in Lebanon were expected. Israeli aircraft are preparing to attack Hezbollah's strategic weapons stashed in houses in Lebanon's Bekaa valley, the Israeli military spokesperson said, calling on civilians to evacuate immediately.
"The sights now from south Lebanon are of secondary explosions of Hezbollah weapons, which are exploding inside houses. In every house we are attacking there are weapons. Rockets, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles that were meant for and aimed at killing Israeli civilians," Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement.
The strikes have raised pressure on Hezbollah, which last week suffered an attack its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah called unprecedented in the group's history, after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.
The operation was widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed or denied responsibility. In another major blow, an Israeli airstrike on Beirut's southern suburb on Friday struck senior Hezbollah commanders, killing 45 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Hezbollah said 16 members of the group were among the dead, including senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another commander, Ahmed Wahbi.
The fighting has raised fears that the U.S., Israel's close ally, and Iran will be sucked into a wider Middle East war. One person was slightly hurt by shrapnel from a rocket barrage in northern Israel, according to the Israeli ambulance service.
Imad Kreidieh, head of Lebanese telecoms company Ogero, told Reuters on Monday that more than 80,000 automated calls asking people to evacuate their areas were detected on the network. Not all were answered.
Lebanon's Interior Minister Bassam al-Mawlawi opened schools in Beirut, the northern city of Tripoli and in the south as shelters amid heavy displacement of citizens, his office said. Evacuation calls have been received on phones as far as the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
'PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR'
Lebanon's information minister Ziad Makary said his ministry had received a call ordering the building to evacuate, but said the ministry would do no such thing. "This is a psychological war," Makary told Reuters.
Suffering from a financial meltdown, Lebanon can ill afford to face another war like the one that erupted in 2006, when Israel pounded the country during a month-long conflict with Hezbollah, inflicting heavy damage to infrastructure.
In the eastern Beirut district of Sassine, state employee Joseph Ghafary said he feared Hezbollah would respond to Israel's strikes and that a full-blown war would break out. "If Hezbollah carries out a major operation, Israel will respond and destroy more than this. We can't bear it," he said.
"Israel wants to strike, it wants to keep going, meaning it is squeezing Sayyed Hassan (Nasrallah) to start a war. It is definitely dangerous."
Mohammed Sibai, a shopowner in the Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra, told Reuters that he saw the escalation in strikes as "the beginning of the war." "If they want war, what can we do? It was imposed on us. We cannot do anything," he said.