Israel’s latest attacks on central Beirut flattened a residential building, killing at least 11 people and injuring nearly two dozen, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
The Israeli forces fired at least four missiles carrying bunker buster bombs, completely flattening an eight-storey building and damaging many more in the heavily populated area, Reuters reported.
The attack early on Saturday morning shook the Lebanese capital and left a deep crater in the Basta area. Rescue workers and paramedics were still at work trying to find people trapped under the rubble, and the death toll could rise, Lebanon’s National News Agency said.
The Israeli forces, meanwhile continued to pummel Gaza from ground and air, with the Palestinian territory’s civil defence saying airstrikes and tank fire overnight killed at least 19 people, many of them children.
Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson from the civil defence, told the AFP news agency that more than 40 people were also injured “in three massacres caused by Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip between midnight and this morning”.
People were also killed by tank fire in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, Basal added.
Footage on social media showed a giant plume of smoke rising from the Beirut neighbourhood after the residential building collapsed.
Israel’s military claimed its “fighter jets completed a new round of strikes” that targeted “Hezbollah command centres” and “weapons storage facilities”.
The attack left several buildings damaged and car windows shattered.
“There was dust and wrecked houses, people running and screaming, they were running,” Nemir Zakariya, several of whose family members were severely injured in the attack, told Reuters.
“My wife is in hospital, my daughter is in hospital, my aunt is in the hospital,” he said.
The attack marked the fourth Israeli air strike on central Beirut just this week alone.
Israeli ground forces, meanwhile, continued to attack southern Lebanon, where they have been trying to push through with their invasion in the face of resistance by Hezbollah since September.
Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon and the outskirts of Beirut killed at least five medics on Friday, as ground troops clashed with Hezbollah fighters further south.
The Lebanese public health ministry confirmed that five doctors from the Islamic Health Organization were killed in the Israeli strikes which it condemned as “war crimes”.
Three of them were killed in the Qatrani area in southern Jezzine district and two some 80km south of Beirut, Aljazeera reported.
Four Italian soldiers with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon were also injured, the defence ministry in Rome said in a statement.
“Attacks against UNIFIL are a grave and unacceptable violation of international law and must stop,” EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a post on X.
Israel’s ground and air assault on Lebanon has killed over 3,500 people so far and forced over a million to flee from their homes, according to the health ministry.
US envoy Amos Hochstein travelled to Lebanon and Israel earlier this week in an attempt to secure a ceasefire.
He indicated that some progress had been made with Beirut and Tel Aviv but specific details were not available.
The Israeli war on Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and left almost the entire population of 2.2 million without shelter and on the brink of starvation, according to the besieged territory’s health ministry, the UN and a host of humanitarian agencies.
