Live updates: Israel and Hezbollah attacks, deadliest day in Lebanon since 2006, war in Gaza

Conflicts are not uncommon in Lebanon. But Monday was the deadliest day the country has seen in a generation.

According to Lebanese authorities, the Israeli airstrike killed nearly 500 people, including at least 35 children and 58 women.

That’s almost half the death toll during the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

That conflict was brutal. I still remember the stench of the victims decomposing in refrigerated trucks because it was too dangerous to transport the bodies while Israeli combat drones and fighter jets patrolled overhead.

When the fighting finally stopped, around 1,100 Lebanese had been killed. On the Israeli side, 21 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians were killed.

Fighting in the shadows: On the battlefield, Hezbollah fighters must be a formidable enemy. In 2006, they fought an Israeli ground assault until it was halted. But during the entire war, I never saw a single armed Hezbollah fighter, so good are they at blending in.

The Iran-backed group operates as a “state within a state” in a deeply divided country whose government is nearly bankrupt and has no president. The scars of a 15-year civil war still remain in its neighborhoods.

The Lebanese civilian population knows only too well how terrifying the Israeli military’s attempts to attack Hezbollah can be.

On Friday, Israeli fighter jets launched an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, killing several senior Hezbollah commanders. The rockets also destroyed a nine-story building in a densely populated neighborhood and killed 45 people, including women and children.

The Israeli military accuses Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields.

Families flee: But that is little consolation for Lebanese citizens like my mother-in-law, who lived just a block and a half from the building destroyed by Israeli jets. For several hours, my family tried to evacuate my wife’s grandmother, who had suffered a stroke and was unable to leave her apartment.

Like the panicked civilians who fled Israeli bombardment in southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, my in-laws have sought refuge in another neighborhood.

Four generations now live in a single apartment, including a week-old newborn and aunts and uncles who work as teachers and construction contractors. They have no connection to Hezbollah.

We hope and pray that their neighborhood will not be bombed.