Civilian death toll from Nasrallah airstrike remains at only ELEVEN and is not expected to rise. They fled beforehand. (But 20 Hezbollah members were killed.)

I mentioned that, as of Saturday, the Lebanese health minister said he was only aware of 11 victims of the massive airstrike that destroyed four buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

It has not increased since then.

How could that be?

Lebanese newspaper L'Orient le Jour (French) looks for the presumed hundreds of victims, and cannot find them.

But they do find a number of people who say that the entire neighborhood was already empty before the airstrikes.

Following the attack, the site was sealed off by Hezbollah security services as they searched for their leader. ...Most of the neighborhood’s residents had reportedly left the area the week before the attack, in a “natural evacuation,” according to the rescuer. “As the airstrikes (against the southern suburbs in recent days) increased, people fled. When the Maamoura neighborhood was bombed, there was no one there, and it was the same in Jamous and Kafa’at,” he said, referring to the strikes that took place throughout the night of September 27.

The deadly strike came after a week of unprecedented attacks on Hezbollah, including the detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies that killed some 30 people and wounded thousands more across the country. In response, members of the Shiite party went door-to-door in the southern suburbs and advised people to leave their homes and seek shelter elsewhere.

Rukaya, who has lived for 40 years in Burj al-Barajneh, the neighborhood beside Haret Hreik where Nasrallah was killed, told L’Orient Today that people knew the place was vulnerable to attack from the Israelis and had started to leave earlier that week. "You could hear crickets across the Burj" she said.

 Twenty-four hours after the strike, the Health Ministry announced that 11 people had been killed and 108 wounded in the Israeli strikes the previous day, but it did not specify where or when the deaths occurred, or whether Nasrallah and other possible Hezbollah victims were included in the death toll. The enormity of the damage caused by the strikes raised fears that the death toll could be much higher. The day after the attack, outgoing Health Minister Firas Abiad said at a press conference that the death toll could rise.

Saad el-Ahmar stressed that on September 30, the search operations were almost over. The teams continue to clear the roads and sweep the area "to make sure that no bodies have been forgotten," the rescuer explained. However, he believes that the toll provided by the ministry should not increase significantly, given that it seems that very few people were present. 

The airstrike the previous week that killed some 15 members of Hezbollah's Radwan unit was in the same neighborhood, so that might have prompted residents to flee.

At any rate, Israel's airstrikes killed far fewer people than anyone expected - seemingly less than 15 civilians - - making any claims of indiscriminate bombing ludicrous. Clearly Israel knew the buildings were empty, and possibly the timing was specifically meant to ensure a minimum of civilian casualties. 

If Israel's claims that over 20 Hezbollah members were killed are true, that means more terrorists were killed than civilians! And Israel named at least five of them, besides Nasrallah himself and the IRGC general who was there.

I'm wondering if those Hezbollah party members going door to door urging people to leave were really Israeli spies who wanted to minimize casualties. 

This small detail makes an amazing operation even more impressive. Too bad most media hasn't reported on this, preferring to leave people with the impression of a huge civilian death toll.

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