A powerful airstrike targeted central Beirut on Saturday, security sources said, shaking the Lebanese capital as Israel pressed its offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
At least four people were killed and 33 wounded in the attack in Beirut’s Basta neighbourhood, Hezbollah’s al-Manar broadcaster reported, citing the health ministry. Lebanon’s National News Agency said early on Saturday that the attack resulted in a large number of fatalities and injuries and destroyed an eight-storey building. Footage broadcast by Lebanon’s Al Jadeed station showed at least one destroyed building and several others badly damaged around it.
The blasts shook the capital around 4am, Reuters witnesses said. Security sources said at least four bombs were dropped.
It marked the fourth Israeli airstrike this week hitting a central area of Beirut, where the bulk of Israel’s attacks have targeted the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs.
The National News Agency reported: “Beirut, the capital, woke up to a horrific massacre, as the Israeli enemy’s air force completely destroyed an eight-storey residential building with five missiles on Al-Mamoun Street in the Basta area.”
Agence France-Presse journalists heard at least three large explosions.
Earlier, on Friday, Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and the outskirts of Beirut, reportedly killing at least five medics.
Israeli ground troops also clashed with Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon’s south on Friday, with the militant group saying it fired rockets at Israeli forces east of the town of Khiyam at least four times over the day. Israeli troops had advanced in a string of villages to the west, Lebanese security sources said.
An Israeli airstrike on a residence near Dar Al-Amal University hospital in Baalbek province, north-eastern Lebanon, killed the hospital’s director along with six of his colleagues, Lebanon’s health ministry said on Friday.
Four Italian soldiers were lightly injured after two rockets exploded at a Unifil peacekeeping force base in southern Lebanon, a spokesperson for the UN force said on Friday.
Italian sources said an investigation was under way. The foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told Italian media that Hezbollah might be responsible for the attack.
Israeli strikes on two other villages in southern Lebanon killed five medics from a rescue force affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese health ministry said.
The more than 3,500 people killed by Israeli strikes over the past year include more than 200 medics, the ministry said.
In Lebanon, Israel has pushed on with its intense military campaign against Hezbollah, tempering hopes that efforts by a US envoy will lead to an imminent ceasefire. US mediator Amos Hochstein said this week in Beirut that a truce was “within our grasp”. He travelled on to meet the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Israel Katz, before returning to Washington, the US news outlet Axios said.
The White House said on Friday that the US president, Joe Biden, and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, discussed efforts “to secure a ceasefire deal in Lebanon that will allow residents on both sides of the Blue Line to return safely to their homes”.
More than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah along Lebanon’s southern border escalated when Israel ramped up its strikes in late September and sent ground troops into Lebanon on 1 October.
Abeer Darwich, a resident of a building that was hit on Friday in Beirut’s southern suburbs – a once densely populated stronghold of Hezbollah – had to leave her apartment immediately after an evacuation warning from Israel’s military. She stood watching while an Israeli strike pounded the high-rise building into dust.
“Do you know that most of the apartments’ owners took credit to buy those houses? Life savings are gone, memories and safety … which Israel decided to steal from us,” Darwich said.
Evacuation warnings were publicised for several buildings in the area on Friday.
In Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Friday that hospitals had only two days’ fuel left before they must restrict services, after the UN warned that aid delivery to the territory was being crippled.
The director of Gaza’s field hospitals, Marwan al-Hams, said all hospitals in the Palestinian territory “will stop working or reduce their services within 48 hours due to the occupation’s [Israel’s] obstruction of fuel entry”.
The World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “deeply concerned about the safety and wellbeing of 80 patients, including eight in the intensive care unit” at Kamal Adwan hospital, one of just two partly operating in northern Gaza.
The warning on Friday came a day after the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and the former defence minister Yoav Gallant more than a year into the Gaza war. The UN and others have repeatedly decried humanitarian conditions in Gaza, particularly in the north, where Israel said on Friday it had killed two commanders involved in Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack that triggered the war.
Gaza medics said an Israeli raid on the cities of Beit Lahia and nearby Jabalia overnight to Friday resulted in dozens killed or missing.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse