Lebanon said an Israeli airstrike in the center of Beirut on Saturday collapsed a residential building and shocked residents across the city, killing at least 15 people.
A Lebanese security source told AFP that “a prominent Hezbollah figure was targeted” in the attack, but a Hezbollah lawmaker denied the presence of any officials from the Iran-backed group.
Others in the city’s southern suburbs attacked the capital after the Israeli military called for evacuation.
Israel has not commented on the attack in central Beirut.
Rescue operations were underway in the area on Saturday morning, with an excavator removing debris from the eight-storey building.
“The attack was so powerful that it felt as if the building was going to collapse on our heads,” said Sameer, 60, who lives in a building opposite the destroyed one.
He said he fled his home at midnight with his wife and children.
“We saw two dead people on the ground… the children started crying and their mothers started crying even more,” he told AFP.
Lebanon’s health ministry said the Israeli strike hit the working-class neighborhood of Basta, killing at least 15 people and wounding 63.
“The final number of deaths will be determined after DNA testing,” the ministry said in a statement.
The state-run National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli jets fired six missiles at the structure, causing “widespread destruction in buildings” nearby.
There was no evacuation warning from the Israeli military before the early morning attack in Basta.
‘Diplomatic solution’
Similar attacks carried out without warning outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds have tended to target senior figures, but Hezbollah MP Amin Sherry has denied any officials were present at the time of the attack.
“There were no people from the party in the two targeted buildings,” NNA quoted him as saying when visiting the scene.
The Israeli air force also struck eastern Lebanon, killing eight people in the town of Shomostar overlooking the Bekaa Valley, another Hezbollah stronghold, the health ministry said.
“The Israeli enemy attack on Shamostar killed eight people, including four children, and injured nine others, four of whom are in serious condition,” a ministry statement said.
Israel intensified its campaign against the Hezbollah group in late September, targeting its strongholds in Lebanon’s east and south as well as south Beirut, and ground troops after nearly a year of limited cross-border fire. Sent to.
Lebanon’s health ministry says more than 3,650 people have been killed since October 2023, when Hezbollah began firing with Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas. The highest number of deaths have occurred since September this year.
In a telephone call with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Saturday, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin reiterated “the US commitment to a diplomatic solution in Lebanon that allows Israeli and Lebanese citizens to return safely to their homes on both sides of the border”. , a spokesperson said. ,
US envoy Amos Hochstein is shuttling between Lebanon and Israel this week to broker a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war.
After talks in Beirut earlier this week, he said a deal was “within our reach,” but as he flew to Israel, both sides made statements that dashed hopes of rapid progress.
Deadly attacks on Gaza
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
At least 44,176 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza during more than 13 months of war, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which the United Nations considers credible.
Civil protection agency spokesman Mahmoud Bassal told AFP on Saturday that 19 people were killed and more than 40 wounded in early Israeli airstrikes and tank shelling.
Umm Muhammad Abu Sablah, the sister of one of the victims of Saturday’s attacks, told AFP that she arrived at the scene to find “people carrying body parts out from under the debris.”
“Our whole life is suffering. Let them kill us all so we can get rid of this suffering,” the 62-year-old man said in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.
The war has created a humanitarian crisis in the besieged region, where people are facing severe shortages of food, fuel and medicines.
In his call with Katz, the Pentagon chief “urged the Israeli government to continue taking steps to improve the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza”.
The United Nations and others have repeatedly condemned humanitarian conditions, particularly in northern Gaza.
The United Nations says more than 100,000 people have been displaced from the region since the beginning of October, and an official told the Security Council last week that people are “effectively starving”.
The flow of aid into Gaza was the main basis in the arrest warrants announced by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant.
The court said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that the pair bear “criminal responsibility” for starvation as a method of war and crimes against humanity, including the destruction of “food, water, electricity and fuel. lack of and specific”. Medical Supplies”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
