By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-09-27 17:05:14 | Updated at 2024-09-30 09:22:17
2 days ago
Israel has launched its heaviest air attack on Beirut in almost a year of conflict with Hezbollah, levelling a number of buildings in the city’s southern suburbs in strikes that it said targeted the militant group’s central headquarters.
Six loud explosions were heard across the Lebanese capital late on Friday afternoon, and multiple large plumes of smoke were visible from as far away as Batroun, a city an hour’s drive away.
Israeli media reported that the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the target and that the military was checking whether he had been hit or not. Sources close to Hezbollah told Reuters he was alive.
The strikes came shortly after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the UN general assembly that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah would continue.
Targeting Nasrallah – even if he was not harmed – marks a staggering escalation on the Israeli side. He represents Iran’s most important regional asset and has long been seen as lynchpin in the so-called “axis of resistance”.
The explosions were so powerful that they rattled windows and shook houses in settlements 18 miles north of Beirut.
Nearby witnesses quoted by the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour described seeing substantial fissures opened in the ground. There was no immediate word on casualties. Ambulances were seen heading to the scene of the explosions, sirens wailing.
The IDF spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari said in a video statement that the HQ was “intentionally built under residential buildings” in Beirut’s southern Dahieh area “as part of Hezbollah’s strategy of using Lebanese people as human shields”.
He said: “Israel is doing what every sovereign state in the world would do if they had a terror organisation that seeks their destruction on their border, taking the necessary action to protect our people so that Israeli families can live in their homes, safely and securely.”
Not long before the attack, thousands of people had massed in Dahieh for the funeral of three Hezbollah members, including a senior commander, killed in earlier strikes.
Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon earlier on Friday killed about 25 people, taking the death toll this week to more than 720, health authorities said.
The Israeli military said it carried out dozens of strikes over the course of two hours around the south on Friday, including in the cities of Sidon and Nabatieh. It said it was targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers and infrastructure. It said Hezbollah fired a volley of rockets toward the northern Israeli city of Tiberias.
A year of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has escalated sharply this week, raising fears of an even more destructive conflict. More than 90,000 people have been reported as newly displaced in Lebanon this week, according to the United Nations, adding to more than 111,000 already uprooted by the conflict.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR said 30,000 people had crossed from Lebanon into Syria in the last few days, 80% of them Syrians. Well over a million Syrians fled to Lebanon during the Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the representative for the refugee agency UNHCR in Syria, said roughly half of the people who had fled were children and adolescents. He said about 80% were Syrians returning to their home country and the rest were Lebanese.
“Now these, of course, are people who are fleeing bombs and who are crossing into a country that has been suffering from its own crisis and violence for 13 years now,” he told reporters in Geneva by video from the Lebanon-Syria border. He said Syria was facing “economic collapse”.
“I think that this just illustrates the kind of extremely difficult choices both Syrians and Lebanese are having to make,” he said.
Hezbollah began firing at Israel on 8 October last year as the Gaza war began, declaring solidarity with the Palestinians. Hezbollah has said it will only cease fire when Israel’s Gaza offensive ends.
The IDF said on Friday it had intercepted a missile fired from Yemen that set off air raid sirens across Israel’s populous central area, including Tel Aviv. Another missile from Yemen landed in central Israel about two weeks ago.
