Israel-Hamas war latest: With nearly 700 killed in a week, Lebanon fears Gaza-level violence

Nearly 700 people have been killed in Lebanon this week, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Israel has dramatically escalated strikes, saying it is targeting Hezbollah’s military capacities and senior Hezbollah commanders.

Top Israeli officials have threatened to repeat the destruction of Gaza in Lebanon if the Hezbollah fire continues, raising fears that Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 would be repeated in Lebanon.

The International Organization for Migration estimated Thursday that more than 200,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel in support of Hamas after it stormed into Israel, sparking the Israel-Hamas war. Lebanon says a total of 1,540 people have been killed within its borders in that time.

The United States, France and other allies jointly called for a 21-day cease-fire. Lebanon's foreign minister said the country welcomed the cease-fire efforts, and decried Israel’s “systematic destruction of Lebanese border villages.”

Israeli military vehicles were seen transporting tanks and armored vehicles toward the country’s northern border with Lebanon, and commanders have issued a call-up of reservists. Netanyahu says Israel is striking Hezbollah “with full force” and won’t stop until its goals are achieved.

Here’s the latest:

BEIRUT — An Israeli airstrike on a border village has killed nine members of the same family, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said Friday.

NNA said nine people were killed in the early Friday airstrike on the village of Chebaa that destroyed their three-story building.

Chebaa is in an area where the borders of Syria, Israel and Lebanon meet, and was struck several times in recent months.

On Friday, Israeli warplanes struck towns and villages in southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, according to NNA.

JERUSALEM — Incoming fire from Lebanon into Israel continued Friday, with one man suffering wounds from shrapnel.

The Israeli military said four drones came across the border Friday, all of which were intercepted. Earlier Friday, the Israeli military said another 10 projectiles came into Israel from Lebanon, with some intercepted and others falling into open fields. It said it later targeted launchers in Lebanon behind the missile attacks.

Hezbollah claimed it had targeted the Israeli city of Tiberias with missiles.

DAMASCUS — An overnight Israeli airstrike on a military site in the area of Kfar Yabous in Syria near the border with Lebanon killed five Syrian army soldiers and injured another, Syrian state news agency SANA reported Friday, citing an unidentified military official.

Israel's military did not immediately acknowledge the strike. Israel regularly targets military sites in Syria and facilities linked to Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah but rarely acknowledges them.

Those strikes have become more frequent as Hezbollah has exchanged fire with Israeli forces for the past 11 months against the backdrop of Israel’s war against Hamas — a Hezbollah ally — in Gaza.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrians have fled across the border from Lebanon into Syria since the beginning of the week under intense Israeli bombardment that Israel says is targeting Hezbollah militants and weapons. The week's strikes have killed an estimated 700 people, including at least 150 women and children.

GENEVA — A group of international trade unions on Friday filed a complaint against Israel at the United Nations labor organization in a bid to win compensation for 200,000 Palestinians who have gone unpaid or seen their benefits withheld after the Oct. 7 attacks.

The nine unions say the workers from both Gaza and the West Bank had been employed in Israel before the deadly attacks by armed militants, but were barred from entering to go to their jobs afterward. As a result, the workers and their families have faced millions of dollars’ worth of lost income, financial insecurity and no access to remedies through the courts, they said.

“These workers have experienced widespread wage theft due to the suspension of work permits and the unilateral termination of their contracts,” said a joint statement from the unions, whose members are active in industries as diverse as construction, education, journalism, agriculture, hospitality and transportation.

The filing at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, of which Israel is a member country, is based on language in its constitution that seeks to ensure that countries uphold international commitments they have already made.

Such economic woes that many Palestinians have faced come on top of the bloodshed, displacement and other troubles faced by Gaza and the West Bank as Israel continues its campaign against armed Palestinian militants.

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine government is bracing to evacuate thousands of Filipino workers in Lebanon in case the deadly conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group further escalates, Philippine officials said Friday.

More than 11,000 Filipinos live and work in Lebanon, often as house cleaners. Philippine officials have not yet ordered a mandatory evacuation of its citizens because it was not yet clear whether a full-scale war would erupt, including an Israeli ground attack.

Many Filipinos were adamant not to leave their jobs in Lebanon and return to uncertainties at home, but they have been told to be ready to evacuate any time, Foreign Undersecretary Eduardo De Vega told a news briefing in Manila.

They say “it’s better for them to die in war than to die of hunger,” De Vega said. But he added without elaborating that the Philippine government prepared a contingency plan for a massive evacuation if widespread ground fighting erupts across Lebanon.

Philippine Ambassador to Lebanon Raymond Balatbat told reporters in Manila via video on Friday that many Filipinos there “will only decide to leave when the situation is so bad, when the war is at their doorsteps.”

Israeli soldiers work on tanks in northern Israel on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

Israeli soldiers work on tanks in northern Israel on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

Israeli soldiers work on tanks in northern Israel on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

Israeli soldiers work on tanks and APC in northern Israel on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

This satellite image released by Maxar Technologies shows a closer view of a building in Chouaghir, Lebanon, on Sept. 26, 2024, after airstrikes. (Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

This satellite image released by Maxar Technologies shows a closer view of a building in Chouaghir, Lebanon, on Sept. 3, 2024, before airstrikes. (Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

Palestinian supporters march near the United Nations headquarters at a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the 79th session of the UN General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Lebanon's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Emigrants Abdallah Bouhabib addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)

Lebanese soldiers cordon off the area at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

In this combination of the satellite images released by Maxar Technologies shows a view of northern Lebanon, on Aug. 9, 2024, before airstrikes, top, and on Sept. 26, 2024, after airstrikes. (Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies via AP)

Municipality workers remove power cables in front of damaged buildings at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburb, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Volunteers distribute clothes to displaced women at a school in Beirut, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

A resident checks an apartment that was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

PHOENIX (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday will make her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee to confront head-on one of her biggest vulnerabilities ahead of the November election.

She is scheduled to appear in Douglas, Arizona, as former President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans pound Harris relentlessly over the Biden administration's record on migration and fault the vice president for spending little time visiting the border during her time in the White House.

Immigration and border security are top issues in Arizona, the only battleground state that borders Mexico and one that contended with a record influx of asylum seekers last year. Trump has an edge with voters on migration, and Harris has gone on offense to improve her standing on the issue and defuse a key line of political attack for Trump.

In nearly every campaign speech she gives, Harris recounts how a sweeping bipartisan package aiming to overhaul the federal immigration system collapsed in Congress earlier this year after Trump urged top Republicans to oppose it.

"The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” Harris plans to say, according to an excerpt of her remarks previewed by her campaign.

After the immigration legislation stalled, the Biden administration announced rules that bar migrants from being granted asylum when U.S. officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed. Since then, arrests for illegal border crossings have fallen.

Harris will also use her trip to remind voters about her work as attorney general of California in confronting crime along the border. During an August rally in Glendale, outside Phoenix, she talked about helping to prosecute drug- and people-smuggling gangs that operated transnationally and at the border.

“I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won,” Harris said then.

Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost, at 27 the youngest member of Congress and a leading advocate for Harris with young and Hispanic voters, said that in backing stricter enforcement, Harris is trying to “strike a chord” and “she understands that, right now, there is a crisis at the border. It’s a humanitarian crisis.”

“That’s why she’s pushing for more resources at the border so that we have an orderly process, which is really important,” Frost said. “But, the thing is, that’s where Donald Trump stops, is just at enforcement.”

The vice president’s trip to Douglas thrusts the issue of immigration into the brightest spotlight yet less than six weeks before Election Day.

Trump didn’t wait for her to arrive there before pushing back.

On Thursday, he delivered a lengthy diatribe from New York, declaring that “anything she says tomorrow, you know is a fraud because she was the worst in history at protecting our country. So she’ll try and make herself look a little bit better. But it’s not possible."

A day earlier, at a rally in North Carolina, Trump told voters that “when Kamala speaks about the border, her credibility is less than zero."

The Trump campaign has also countered with its own TV ads deriding the vice president as a failed “border czar.”

“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here,” said one spot. However, estimates on how many people have entered the country illegally since the start of the Biden administration in 2021 vary widely.

Harris also never held the position of border czar. Instead, her assignment was to tackle the “root causes” of migration from three Central American nations — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — that were responsible for a significant share of border crossers.

The vice president took a long-term approach to an immediate problem, helping persuade multinational corporations and Latin American businesses to invest in the region. That, she argued, would create jobs and give locals more reasons to stay home rather than take the arduous trek north.

Still, Trump has continued to decry an “invasion” of border crossers.

Polls show that most American trust him to handle immigration more than they do Harris.

Douglas, where Harris will appear, is an overwhelmingly Democratic border town in GOP-dominated Cochise County, where the Republicans on the board of supervisors are facing criminal charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results. Trump was in the area last month, using a remote stretch of border wall and a pile of steel beams to draw a contrast between himself and Harris on border security.

The town of 16,000 people has strong ties to its much larger neighbor, Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a busy port of entry that’s slated for a long-sought upgrade. Many locals are as concerned with making legal border crossings more efficient as they are with combatting illegal ones.

Weissert reported from Washington.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris addresses the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on the Carnegie Mellon University campus in Pittsburgh, Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump Tower in New York, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024. (Seth Wenig)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks as she meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, at the Vice President's ceremonial office inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)