Deadly air strike on central Beirut after Israel hits Lebanon in north and south
At least 11 killed and 63 wounded by Israeli bombing of Beirut homes
(about 11 hours later)
Israel targets Hezbollah in Lebanese capital while hospital director and six colleagues reportedly killed in north, with more medics and UN peacekeepers among other casualties
Missing families feared dead after block of flats and nearby homes destroyed by airstrikes on Lebanese capital
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 11 people have been killed and 63 wounded in a series of Israeli airstrikes on an apartment block in the densely populated Basta neighbourhood of central Beirut.
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.
At least four bombs hit an eight-storey apartment building at about 4am on Saturday, without warning, producing blasts heard around the Lebanese capital. The strike levelled the building and destroyed seven smaller residential buildings in the surroundings, leaving meters-deep craters of rubble where the structures once stood.
The blasts shook the capital around 4am, Reuters witnesses said. Security sources said at least four bombs were dropped.
Lebanon’s National News Agency said the strikes used bunker busters, and the sound of the explosions were similar to those heard when Israeli used the penetrative munition to kill the former head of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, but the Guardian was unable to independently verify these reports.
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 target of the Israeli strikes was unclear. Israeli media reports offered the name of several high-level Hezbollah officials as possible targets, but a Hezbollah MP denied any member of the group was in the building at the time and Israeli authorities had yet to comment on the reason for the strike.
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.”
Rescuers were continuing to search for survivors, but were not optimistic that the dozens of people who went missing in the blast would be recovered alive.
Agence France-Presse journalists heard at least three large explosions.
“We are still just at the beginning of the rescue operations. I’m not sure anyone is alive underneath the rubble – this is the strongest strike I’ve seen,” a rescue worker said.
Earlier, on Friday, Israeli forces pounded southern Lebanon and the outskirts of Beirut, reportedly killing at least five medics.
Abu Omar al-Safaa, a 55-year-old who lives in a building adjacent to the strike, spent all morning digging through rubble to find his relatives who lived in the building.
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.
“When I heard the strikes, I rushed here and tried to pull people out. Only one person, my cousin, was pulled out alive. The rest were dead,” al-Safaa said, sitting down to take a rest. He lost two cousins in the strike and more of his relatives were missing.
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.
Nearby buildings were damaged, some of them rendered uninhabitable by the force of the explosion. Hassan, a 40-year-old resident of a building five metres away from the strike site, said he would be forced to live with his relatives elsewhere. He was still waiting for news of his neighbour, a Syrian couple with three children who were in the building at the time of the strike.
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.
Aid workers from the local charity Banin had set up a table to register people who had lost their homes and provide them with temporary accommodations in a sports stadium on the outskirts of Beirut.
Italian sources said an investigation was under way. The foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told Italian media that Hezbollah might be responsible for the attack.
The strikes came as Israel intensified its aerial bombing campaign in Lebanon and advanced its troops in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military reached the hilltop town of Shamaa, 3.5 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, where it is still engaged in fighting with Hezbollah. Shamaa is a strategic point that overlooks the coast and specifically the city of Tyre, the second-largest city in south Lebanon.
Israeli strikes on two other villages in southern Lebanon killed five medics from a rescue force affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese health ministry said.
Hezbollah, in turn, continued to bomb northern Israel and target Israeli troops in south Lebanon. On Friday, Hezbollah said it shelled Israeli troops in the border village of Khiam, where fighting has been concentrated for the past three weeks.
The more than 3,500 people killed by Israeli strikes over the past year include more than 200 medics, the ministry said.
Diplomatic efforts to produce a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel have intensified over the past two weeks. The US envoy Amos Hochstein visited Beirut and Tel Aviv this week, where he said progress was being made to reach a deal, but gaps still remained over how to enforce violations of any potential ceasefire.
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.
Hezbollah and Israel said fighting would continue in parallel with ceasefire negotiations.
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”.
Since fighting began, after Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on 8 October 2023 “in solidarity” with Hamas’s attack the day before, more than 3,645 people have been killed in Lebanon – 80% of whom were killed since Israel launched its intensified aerial campaign and ground incursion in Lebanon at the end of September.
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.
