Israeli Warplanes Hit a Building in Kfar Rumman Before Dawn. Nine People Died, Including a Child.

KFAR RUMMAN, Lebanon — Israel's air force carried out two airstrikes on this southern Lebanese village early Monday, killing at least nine people and wounding others, including women and children, Lebanon's Health Ministry said.

One of the strikes hit a residential building and killed eight people, among them a child and two women, according to the ministry. Eleven people were wounded in that strike alone, including four children and two women. A second strike hit a car in the same village and killed a paramedic with the Lebanese Islamic Risala Scout Association, one of the volunteer ambulance services that has kept operating through nearly two years of cross-border fighting. Two other people in the car were wounded. Lebanon's state news agency put the toll higher, at 11 dead, and said two medics were among them. The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah operatives moving weapons into the town and said it was investigating the reports of civilian casualties.

Residents came out at first light to stand in front of the wreckage. "We have been living in constant anxiety amid shelling on the outskirts," said Fouad Chakaron, who lives in Kfar Rumman. "Now they struck the heart of the town." Another resident, Saleh Medlej, pointed at the flattened building and said families with children had lived inside it. "Are there missiles here?" he asked. He said he would not leave regardless. "I will not leave this place," Medlej said.

The strikes landed in the middle of a sharp new escalation. Days earlier, the Israeli military said it was in "operational control" of Ali Taher, a strategic hill that overlooks several villages and the main roads leading to the city of Nabatiyeh. Earlier Monday, the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning for a specific home in the nearby village of Deir al-Zahrani, and a building there was struck shortly afterward. There was no immediate word on casualties from that strike. On Sunday, Israeli strikes killed at least seven people in southern Lebanon and leveled a hospital that had already been emptied.

All of it is happening under a truce. A U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has been violated repeatedly, with Israel carrying out airstrikes inside Lebanon and Hezbollah firing drones at Israeli troops. In June, Lebanon and Israel signed a U.S.-mediated framework under which Israeli forces would withdraw from southern Lebanon in exchange for the disarmament of Hezbollah. Little of it has been implemented. Israeli troops remain on Lebanese soil, Hezbollah remains armed, and the villages between the two positions keep absorbing the consequences.

For the people of Kfar Rumman, the distinction between a ceasefire and a war has narrowed to a technicality. The shelling had been on the edges of town for months. On Monday it was in the middle of it.