Israeli strike kills 23 Syrian workers in Younine near Baalbek

An Israeli airstrike in Lebanon hit a building housing Syrian workers, killing 23 of them and wounding eight other people, Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported Thursday.

The National News Agency said the strike late Wednesday occurred in the country's northeast, near the ancient city of Baalbek, in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley, which runs along the Syrian border.

The agency quoted Ali Kassas, mayor of the village of Younine, as saying that the bodies of 23 Syrian citizens were pulled from under the rubble. He said four Syrians and four Lebanese were wounded.

Hussein Salloum, a local official in Younine, said most of the dead were women and children, and that rescue efforts lasted through the night and into Thursday morning.

“We dug through the rubble with our own hands” until a small bulldozer was brought in, Salloum told The Associated Press by telephone. “We had very limited capabilities.”

The Lebanese Red Cross said it recovered nine bodies, while others were recovered by the Hezbollah militant group’s paramedic service and the Lebanese Civil Defense.

Israel has carried out days of heavy strikes across Lebanon targeting what it says are sites belonging to Hezbollah, which has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel.

More than 630 people have been killed on the Lebanese side, according to local health authorities, who say around a quarter were women and children. Several people have been wounded by shrapnel in Israel.

Lebanon, with a population of around 6 million, hosts nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands who are unregistered — the world’s highest refugee population per capita.