Hezbollah announced Saturday that a second commander had been killed in a deadly IDF attack on the Lebanese capital, which left at least 37 dead and dozens wounded.
The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has risen to 37, Lebanon’s health minister said Saturday.
Firass Abiad told reporters that 68 people were injured, 15 of whom were still in hospital, adding that search and rescue operations were still ongoing and the number of casualties was likely to rise.
The rare strike, the deadliest in the Lebanese capital since the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, hit a densely populated southern neighborhood Friday afternoon during rush hour as people were returning home.
Airstrikes continued on Saturday, according to a Lebanese news agency.
Israel said it killed 11 Hezbollah members, including Ibrahim Akil, who led the elite Radwan force. The militant group members were attending a meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed.
Hezbollah announced Friday evening that 15 of its members – including two senior commanders, Ahmed Mahmoud Wahbi and Ibrahim Akil – had been killed by Israeli forces.
According to the official Lebanese news agency NNA, Israeli warplanes carried out 111 new airstrikes in one hour on Saturday, between 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. local time.
Lebanese troops cordoned off the area, preventing people from reaching the building which was demolished, while members of the Lebanese Red Cross stood nearby to recover any bodies found under the rubble.
On Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s press office took journalists to visit the site of the airstrike, where workers were still digging through the rubble.
Public Works and Transport Minister Ali Hamie told reporters at the scene that more than a dozen people were still missing.
The airstrike on busy Qaim Street destroyed an eight-story building with 16 apartments and damaged another adjacent one.
The missiles destroyed the first building and went through the basement of the second, where the meeting of Hezbollah officials was taking place.
Deadly strike comes after intense bombardment
Friday’s deadly attack came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments on northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, targeting mostly Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets.
The extremist group said its latest wave of rocket fire was in response to previous Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. However, it comes days after massive explosions of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies killed at least 37 people, including two children. Some 2,900 others were injured in the attack, widely blamed on Israel.
Lebanon’s health minister said Saturday that hospitals across the country were full of wounded.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the attack, which marked a major escalation in the past 11 months of simmering conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese border.
ADVERTISEMENTIsrael and Hezbollah have exchanged fire regularly since Hamas’s October 7 offensive on southern Israel triggered the Israeli military’s devastating Gaza offensive. But previous cross-border attacks have mostly hit evacuated areas of northern Israel and less populated areas of southern Lebanon.
Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet said halting Hezbollah attacks in the north of the country to allow residents to return home was now an official war aim, as it considers a broader military operation in Lebanon that could trigger an all-out conflict.
Israel has since sent a powerful combat force to the northern border.
The retaliatory strikes forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
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