Israel strikes Beirut and vows ‘strong’ response to Iran missile attack – live

Israel’s strike on a building in the Bachoura district near the Lebanese parliament makes it the closest air assault they have launched to the city’s central downtown district.

A photo circulating on Lebanese WhatsApp groups, which has not yet been verified, showed a heavily damaged building with its first floor on fire.

“Another sleepless night in Beirut. Counting the blasts shaking the city. No warning sirens. Not knowing what’s next. Only that uncertainty lies ahead. Anxiety and fear are omnipresent,” UN special coordinator in Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, said on X on Thursday.

The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of villages and towns in southern Lebanon that are north of a United Nations-declared buffer zone established after the 2006 war.

The warnings issued on Thursday signalled a possible broadening of Israel’s incursion, which until now has been confined to areas close to the border.

Israel has told people to leave Nabatieh, a provincial capital, and other communities north of the Litani River. This area formed the northern edge of the border zone established by the UN Security Council after the 2006 war.

Just after the warning, the Lebanese Red Cross said an Israeli strike wounded four of its paramedics and killed a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south.

It says the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted on Thursday despite co-ordinating its movements with UN peacekeepers.

Israel has killed Abdel-Aziz Salha, a West Bank Hamas militant who had been jailed for life for taking part in the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 but later deported to Gaza in a prisoner swap, Hamas media and medics said.

Salha was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a tent inside Al-Aklouk School, which shelters displaced Palestinians, in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip earlier on Thursday, medics said.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on Salha’s death or whether he had been deliberately targeted.

Militant group Hezbollah says it has detonated a bomb against Israeli forces infiltrating a southern Lebanese village.

Iran has accused the G7 of being “biased and irresponsible” after the group condemned its attack on Israel, a foreign ministry spokesperson said.

Iran launched more than 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday in what it said was retaliation for the killings of militant leaders and aggression in Gaza and Lebanon.

Abbas Nilforoushan, a deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was also killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut a week ago that killed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.

In a statement on Wednesday, Group of Seven (G7) leaders condemned Tehran’s attack. They expressed “strong concern” over the crisis in the Middle East but said a diplomatic solution was still viable and a region-wide conflict was in no one’s interest.

Russia has started evacuating citizens from Lebanon and a special flight left Beirut on Thursday with the family members of Russian diplomats, Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov said.

About 60 people will arrive in Russia from Lebanon on Thursday, his ministry said.

“The evacuation is carried out on the instructions of Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the ministry said.

Russia often also helps evacuate citizens from other former Soviet republics in such situations.

A second UK government evacuation flight is on its way to Beirut. Up to 180 British citizens and their dependents are likely to board the charter jet to Birmingham via Bucharest.

Flight DN9999 will repeat the pattern of Wednesday’s first flight, and uses the same plane, belonging to the Romanian airline, Dan Air. It is a 15-year-old Airbus A320 – a standard low-cost jet equipped with 180 seats. After an overnight stop in Birmingham, it is heading back empty nonstop to Beirut.

On Thursday afternoon it is scheduled to depart from Beirut at 3.40pm, Lebanese time, with another technical stop at Bucharest to refuel and change crew.

More evacuation flights are planned. The government says they “will continue for as long as the security situation allows”.

Lebanon’s health ministry have said that at least nine people were killed in an Israeli strike in central Beirut.

DNA tests on remains are currently ongoing to identify those killed, while people were injured in the strike on an amartment building. Hezbollah said that seven paramedics and rescue workers from its medical arm the Islamic Health Committee were killed in the strike that hit its office in Bashoura.

Prior to the attack, the ministry said that 55 people were killed and 156 others were wounded in Israeli strikes over Lebanon on Wednesday.

The Israeli military have warned citizens in 25 more areas in southern Lebanon to evacuate and head north.

In a new update on social media, the Israel Defence Forces’ Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee urged civilians to “save your lives”.