Israel launched an intense barrage of airstrikes across swathes of Lebanon on Monday in what was the deadliest day for the country since at least the 2006 war fought between Israel and the powerful Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Terror and despair gripped Lebanese residents as Israeli bombs killed at least 492 people, including dozens of children and wounded more than 1,600 others, authorities said, as residents fled their homes desperate to reach safety.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country is changing the “balance of power” on its northern front as its military said it struck 1,600 Hezbollah assets across Lebanon on Monday and has not ruled out the possibility of a ground invasion.

Several countries have warned the strikes increase the risk of a wider regional war and have called for urgent international pressure to de-escalate the situation. Despite the scale and intensity of Monday’s strikes, neither side is calling the current escalation a war.

Here’s what we know.

What happened?

On Monday, Israel intensified its air campaign on Hezbollah, launching “extensive strikes” targeting the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon. It marked the deadliest day of Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the 2006 war and hit multiple parts of the country, mainly in the southern and eastern parts of the country near Lebanon’s border with Syria and where the militant group has a strong presence.

Women, children and medics were among those killed and wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said Monday. It is unclear how many of the casualties were civilians or Hezbollah militants, but many of the locations described by Israel as Hezbollah targets are also residential neighborhoods and villages.

Isarel said that among the Hezbollah targets were “cruise missiles” that had a reach of hundreds of kilometers, rockets, and explosive warheads, according to military spokesperson Daniel Hagari, who claimed the munitions were stored in civilian homes.

Residents began to flee their homes after their phones began pinging with text messages from Israel and calls from unknown numbers urging them to evacuate immediately. A popular Lebanese radio station said it was hacked and its broadcast interrupted by an Israeli evacuation warning. The Israeli military warned civilians to leave areas in which Hezbollah operates, such as those used to store weapons.

Residents said they had little time to flee to safety before the bombing started. One resident in the southern city of Tyre on the coast of Lebanon said he heard Israeli warplanes “raining” bombs near his home from 5 a.m. local time on Monday.

Classes in schools and universities were canceled across the country and some flights to and from Beirut were suspended. Many schools were closed to be used as shelters for those seeking refuge.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah said it fired multiple rocket barrages into northern Israel, targeting the Ramat David airbase, Meggido airfield, and the Amos base, all located in the vicinity of the town of Afula in northern Israel.

Were civilians targeted?

Israel said it was targeting Hezbollah infrastructure, but video shows destruction of residential areas and the large death toll reflects the scale and intensity of the strikes.

The nearly 500 killed on Monday alone is roughly half the number of Lebanese killed throughout the entire 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Israeli warplanes were also seen flying over different parts of the country late afternoon, including over Mount Lebanon where Hezbollah does not have a notable presence.

Lebanon’s representative to the United Nations General Assembly said there was a mass “exodus” of people fleeing. One Lebanese NGO said more than 100,000 people had been displaced.

Residents described seeing buildings collapse and towns being emptied, while images and video show roads blocked by heavy traffic in both directions as people try to flee. Reuters video  from the southern suburbs of Beirut showed debris from damaged buildings and shards of glass littering the ground.

“We have nowhere to go, we have nothing, Mohamed Hamayda, a Syrian man displaced from Deir al-Zahrani, told Agence France-Presse news agency.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Dr. Firass Abiad said convoys of vehicles evacuating people from areas under fire had been “targeted,” as had two ambulances, a fire truck and a medical center. Two first responders were killed, he added.

The Israeli military said it was trying to “mitigate the harm to Lebanese civilians as much as possible,” Hagari said. Netanyahu accused Hezbollah of long using civilians as human shields while aiming rockets at Israeli citizens.

Why is Israel attacking Lebanon?

Hezbollah and Israel have been in conflict for decades – but the two have ramped up their cross-border attacks on each other since last October, when Israel’s war in Gaza began following the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel.

Hezbollah is part of a Tehran-led alliance spanning Yemen, Syria, Gaza, and Iraq that has attacked Israel and its allies since the war with Hamas began. The group has said it will continue striking Israeli targets as long as the war in Gaza goes on.

The increasing escalations have once again brought the region to the edge of an all-out war.

Last week, Hezbollah – one of the most powerful paramilitary forces in the region – was left reeling after a deadly twin attack by Israel, when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members simultaneously exploded across the country. The attack was followed by an Israeli strike on a building in a densely populated southern Beirut, which killed at least 45 people including a top commander and other senior operatives, as well as women and children.

The following days saw some of the most intense exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah in almost a year of war in Gaza, as the Lebanese militant group fired projectiles deeper into Israeli territory than has previously been seen and Israel fired hundreds of projectiles into southern Lebanon.

It came as Israel made a new war objective to return diplaced residents to their homes near the northern border after being evacuated due to Hezbollah attacks.

Though weakened militarily and its secretive lines of communication exposed, Hezbollah’s second-in-command has declared “a new chapter” in the confrontations which he called “a battle without limits.”

Is Lebanon and Israel at war?

While the airstrikes, attacks and rhetoric from both Israel and Hezbollah suggest they are in open conflict, neither side is calling the current escalation a war.

The head of Israel’s military Herzi Halevi said it is “preparing for the next phases” and Netanyahu in a televised speech told the people of Lebanon that his country is not at war with them, but with Hezbollah.

There is a renewed effort from the international community to de-escalate the situation. Qatar, one of the key mediators in talks between Israel and Hamas, said the region is on the “brink of the abyss” and France has requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to address the strikes.

World leaders will be gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly this week and there are feverish efforts behind the scenes to convince Israel not to escalate further and launch a ground incursion into Lebanon.

Though the United States is Israel’s closest ally and biggest weapons supplier, a senior State Department official said the US and its partners are attempting to find a diplomatic solution.

Hurricane John struck Mexico’s southern coast on Monday night after rapidly strengthening into a major Category 3 storm, triggering warnings of ‘life-threatening’ floods and mudslides.

Packing maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (193 kph), the storm made landfall south-southwest of the city of Marquelia in Guerrero state at around 9:15 p.m. local time, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Just a day ago, the storm was pacing at 35 mph (56 kph), but it underwent two rapid intensifications in a 24-hour period, ramping up speed by more than three times.

“This heavy rainfall will likely cause significant and possibly catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides to the Mexican States of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and southeast Guerrero, particularly in areas near the coast,” the center said.

Oaxaca state is a popular tourist spot known for its beautiful landscapes and beaches.

Oaxaca’s governor said the state government had evacuated 3,000 people and set up 80 shelters, while authorities had suspended classes in several costal zones on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.

Businesses in Puerto Escondido, a tourist destination in the southern part of the state, have closed after authorities ordered the suspension of all work on the area’s main beaches, the news agency reported.

Ana Aldai, who works for a restaurant there, told AP she was “a little bit distressed” because notice from authorities came quickly.

“There was no opportunity to make the necessary purchases,” she said.

Torrential rainfall of 10 to 20 inches, with isolated totals near 30 inches, could pummel areas along the Oaxaca coast to southeast Guerrero until Thursday.

The coastal areas of Chiapas are also expected to be hit by rainfall of six to 12 inches, with isolated totals around 15 inches, during the same period.

The rainfall could cause a life-threatening storm surge, producing significant coastal flooding near the landfall location, the National Hurricane Center said.

The surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves in coastal areas, it added.

Michael Kovrig, one of two Canadian men detained in China for more than 1,000 days on alleged spying charges, has described being put in solitary confinement for six months and relentlessly interrogated in what he said was psychological torture.

Dubbed the “Michaels,” Kovrig and fellow Canadian national Michael Spavor were at the heart of a bitter tussle between Beijing and Ottawa that continues to sour diplomatic relations to this day.

“It was psychologically, absolutely, the most grueling, painful thing I’ve ever been through,” Kovrig told CBC News in his first extensive public remarks since being released from Chinese prison three years ago.

Kovrig said he was walking home with his partner, who was six months pregnant at the time, from dinner in Beijing on December 10, 2018 when he was seized by Chinese authorities.

“We came up a spiral staircase right in front of the plaza in front of my apartment building, and boom,” Kovrig recalled. “There’s a dozen men in black with cameras on them surrounding us, shouting in Chinese, ‘That’s him.’”

Kovrig, a former diplomat who was working as a senior advisor for the International Crisis Group think tank, was detained at the same time as Spavor, a Canadian consultant who worked extensively in North Korea, on alleged spying charges.

The pair became embroiled in a three-year diplomatic row that began earlier that month when Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, in Vancouver on US fraud charges.

Kovrig and Spavor were only freed after US prosecutors dropped the extradition request and agreed to release Meng, nearly two years later.

Beijing consistently denied any connection between the arrests of Meng and the Michaels and said Kovrig and Spavor were released on bail for health reasons.

Chinese officials did not publicly disclose any evidence against Spavor or Kovrig, or detailed information relating to their trials, which were held behind closed doors.

‘Chill down my spine’

After he was detained, Kovrig told CBC News he was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into a black SUV, then taken to a padded cell that would be his home for the next six months.

“At that point they said, ‘You are under suspicion of endangering China’s state security. You are going to be interrogated,’” Kovrig said.

“A chill went down my spine.”

Kovrig said he was held in complete isolation in a cell under fluorescent lights for six months, in contravention of UN standards. He said he was interrogated for 6 to 9 hours daily, locked in a chair for hours on end, and at times was forced to survive on three bowls of rice per day.

“They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you into accepting their false version of reality,” Kovrig said.

After six months, Kovrig said he was moved to a larger cell with plexiglass windows, which he shared with a dozen cellmates.

“That was kind of like moving from hell to limbo,” Kovrig said.

Kovrig and Spavor were released in September 2021. Kovrig stepped off the plane in Toronto and hugged his separated wife Vina Nadjibulla, who had campaigned tirelessly for his release, in a touching moment that reverberated across the country.

He also met his daughter, who his partner gave birth to while Kovrig was in prison, for the first time. He described the meeting as “the most fantastic, heartwarming feeling you can imagine.”

“I’ll never forget that sense of wonder, of everything being new and wonderful again, of pushing my daughter on a swing and her saying to her mother, ‘Mummy, I’m so happy.’”

Wole Soyinka became the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, and is now one of the continent’s most revered authors. But two decades earlier, he was sent to prison without trial for speaking out about the civil war in his native Nigeria.

While in solitary confinement he scrawled notes and poems using meat bones, handmade ink and toilet paper. Those ideas became the memoir “The Man Died,” published in 1972, which is now the framework of a movie of the same name that recounts the playwright and novelist’s life at the height of the civil war.

The following interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Larry Madowo: What did it feel like to go to prison just because you were agitating for what you felt was right?

Wole Soyinka: It was a very testing period for me. Twenty-two months in total isolation, denied books, denied paper, my cell constantly searched, nothing at all to sustain my mind.

I think one of the most cunning categories of humanity that I’ve ever encountered is the prisoner. The prisoner has to survive. It’s a survival test, not a question of self-advancement.

And (in solitary confinement) what is the most space-economic enterprise you could undertake? The mental enterprise, calculations, mathematics. I made my own ink with dirt; I made my own pen from the bones in the meat of my food, creating a complete self-sustaining mental micro-world of my own. It was also a dangerous period for the mind.

I remember when I used to hallucinate, so I would leap up and try and destroy those kinds of hallucinatory images that came out. But eventually, I mastered all that period, and after that, I began recollecting those formulae in geometry and trigonometry which I had hated, and I began pulling them back, making calculations on the ground.

Believe it or not, I rediscovered the theory of permutations and combinations. Those things I had hated in school became my sustenance.

LM: You wrote about those prison years in a memoir which has now been turned into a movie, “The Man Died.” Have you seen it yet?

WS:  No. Let me put it this way, turning anything in my life into something other people can watch, pains me. I assisted them in trying to locate a house in which I hid and operated during the civil war. They were looking for something close to one we were using during that period.

But it’s not just about me alone, it’s also about a particular period. I might watch it eventually, but not immediately. Even this very interview we’re doing, I won’t watch. It always takes a while to bring myself to watch me.

LM: You don’t make a big fuss about your birthday, but you just turned 90, which is a big deal.

WS: Well, the annoying thing is that I don’t feel 90. But I will confess that I do share some kind of ritualistic aspect of the birthday. So it’s not a question of dislike, it’s just that I like to have it on my own. Usually what I do on my birthday is disappear into the forest. That’s my normal way of spending birthdays.

LM:  Do you remember when you became politically active? 

WS:  I was a great eavesdropper on my parents’ conversation, especially around my father’s (a school principal and priest in the Anglican church) colleagues. I remember sitting behind an armchair listening.

My mother would arrive and report what had gone on. My father’s whole circle was also involved that way, so I would say that this was the beginning of my political involvement.

When the women rioted in this very town where we are now, Abeokuta, my mother was involved as a lieutenant of (women’s rights activist) Mrs. Ransome Kuti, (famed Afrobeat musician) Fela Kútì’s mother. So as a child, when all the rioting was taking place, I became a courier between the various women’s camps passing messages.

LM: Seeing your mother involved in this political activism appeared to have planted the seed for your life’s work.

WS: That’s correct. Being actually within the environment, that struggle of militancy against an unacceptable situation that these women were facing, how their goods were being seized by police in the marketplaces, if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them beaten up, roughed up, and so on.

Being part and parcel of this and seeing them set upon on their way to go and pass more oppressive legislation, I took the side of the women most naturally (and) that reflected in my writing. No question at all.

LM: There’s a legend about you sneaking into a radio station and swapping out a political speech for something more critical, what’s the truth?

WS: Well, the first thing I have to remind you is that I was tried and acquitted. Yes, it’s true, there’s no point in denying it any longer that I felt compelled to stop the further broadcast of false results.

I witnessed firsthand the destruction of polling booths, even the tearing up of results. I was already heavily politicized at that time, but when I saw this oppressive regime about to reinstall itself, and people have to remember, it was the most cynical regime, which went so far as to declare on radio to say, “we don’t give a damn if you vote for us,” it just triggered my already highly honed militant sense. So it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels. Yeah, guilty, but there was no alternative at that time.

LM: After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, it took a long time for another (Black) African to receive that honor. What did that feel like at the time?

WS: Isolated. I was most relieved when the next African came because so much was demanded of you. It was like overnight your constituency expanded simply because you come from the African continent. On the one hand, of course, a sense of recognition, which is very good. Opening certain doors, but then there were not many doors which I was looking to enter anyway, I just enjoyed my profession, full stop.

But at the same time, especially in societies like ours, it exposed you a lot more. I always remind people that one of the most brutal dictators we had here, Sani Abacha, would’ve gone to his grave a happy man if he hanged a Nobel Laureate, if he may be able to put that on his CV. As it is, he had to be content with hanging an activist, a writer, and his eight companions. I’m referring to Ken Saro-Wiwa.

So it exposed me to very great dangers because I refuse to back down on my beliefs, on my activities simply because I’ve become a Nobel laureate. Why should I stop things which preoccupied me before the Nobel?

But it was grand when one after the other (African Nobel winners) began to come in. Now, I’ve been able to enjoy for some time now being a Nobelist rather being feeling sometimes like a showpiece.

LM: You told some students of an exchange program named after you that you still hope to go to space. What’s your fascination with space?

WS: It began as a child, and I was just fascinated by the stars and constellations. I wrote in one of my essays that I used to close my eyes and imagine a state of total nothingness, and from that, the notion of actually going to space. I recollect when Armstrong stepped on the moon, I was in prison at the time, so that childhood exercise also served me in good stead. My prison bars dissolved overnight just imagining them on the moon. Then space exploration began.

One day, by mail, one of the associations of human development that I belong to had some free tickets for a zero-gravity flight simulator; by then I was 70 years old. I went to San Jose (California) and had my space experience and that is one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.

LM: Richard Branson is taking people to space these days.

WS: If Branson came now and said, I’ve found space for you, I would terminate this interview right now. I’m still in reasonably good shape and I think I can take the gravity stress; I’m convinced I can. I’m willing to do anything. Shoot me into space, I don’t even mind if something happens over there, that’s okay. Then I’ve experienced that childhood obsession.