BEIRUT: Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group 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 violence 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 said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization 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 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
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. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.
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 on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on 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.

Gaza war
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.
At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.
Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.
Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.
Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.
Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options for its response.

GAZA: The Israeli military said Sunday it deployed more troops to defend southern communities and areas bordering Gaza, ahead of the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas.
“The IDF’s (army) Gaza Division has been reinforced with several platoons, with forces stationed to defend both the communities and the border area,” the military said.
“The soldiers are fully equipped to defend the region in coordination with local security forces,” it said in a statement.
Inside Gaza, the military said three divisions were working to “dismantle terrorist infrastructure and degrade Hamas’s capabilities.”
“The Southern Command remains at a heightened state of vigilance and readiness for the coming days,” commanding officer Major General Yaron Finkelman was quoted as saying.
Earlier, the military said its forces had surrounded the area of Jabaliya in central Gaza where Hamas was trying to rebuild its operational capabilities.

“The troops of the 401st Brigade and the 460th Brigade have successfully encircled the area and are currently continuing to operate in the area,” the military said in a statement on Sunday.
It cited intelligence suggesting the “presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure in the area of Jabaliya... as well as efforts by Hamas to rebuild its operational capabilities in the area.”
“Prior to and during the operation, the IAF (air force) struck dozens of military targets in the area to assist IDF (army) ground troops,” the military said, adding that targets hit were weapons storage facilities, underground infrastructure sites and other militant sites.
Hamas-run Gaza’s civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said multiple strikes rocked Jabaliya overnight, with many casualties.
Residents said the Israeli military had targeted the area with heavy bombardments.
“The shelling is random and violent in multiple directions and we do not know where the shelling is coming from and we do not know where to go,” Gaza resident Jameel Al Habibi told AFP.
Israeli forces have regularly targeted Jabaliya since the Gaza war began, displacing most residents.
The military said it was also expanding the humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi along the coastline in southern Gaza.
“For this purpose, two humanitarian evacuation routes from northern Gaza have been reopened: one along the Salaheddine road and the other along the Al-Rashid coastal road,” the military said.
Gaza’s civil defense agency meanwhile said an Israeli air strike on a mosque-turned-shelter on Sunday in central Deir Al-Balah killed 26 people. Israel’s military said it had targeted Hamas militants.
“The number of martyrs brought to hospitals as a result of the occupation’s targeting of displaced people in the Ibn Rushd school and Al Aqsa Martyrs mosque reached 26, with several more wounded,” a health ministry statement said.
Israel’s military said it had “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control center” at the mosque.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 97 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel launched a blistering military campaign in Gaza, vowing to destroy Hamas and bring back the hostages.
At least 41,825 people have been killed in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, the territory’s health ministry said Sunday.
The UN has acknowledged the figures to be reliable.