At least 20 people have been killed and 66 wounded in a series of Israeli airstrikes on an apartment block in the densely populated Basta neighbourhood of central Beirut.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hezbollah and Israel said fighting would continue in parallel with ceasefire negotiations.
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.
