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Israeli airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs intensified overnight and into Sunday, marking the heaviest bombardment of the Lebanese capital since the escalation of Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah last month.
During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometers away.
It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.
On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.
“Last night was the most violent of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first, I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes – we couldn’t count them all – and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.
Israel claimed its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and … infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah … in the area of Beirut.”
Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.
This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion that triggered Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in nearly a year of fighting, most of them in the past two weeks, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. The ministry said on Sunday that 23 people had been killed on Saturday.
The United Nations refugee chief said Sunday that there were “many instances” where Israeli airstrikes had violated international law by hitting civilian infrastructure and killing civilians in Lebanon.
Israel says it targets military capabilities and takes steps to mitigate the risk of harm to civilians, while Lebanese authorities say civilians have been targeted. Israel accuses both Hezbollah and Hamas of hiding among civilians, which they deny.
For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh – considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees – killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.
A Lebanese security source said Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.
Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.
His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.
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