BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said Israel struck a densely packed Beirut neighborhood on Monday, killing five people, in the third attack in two days on the city’s central districts.
“The Israeli enemy strike on Zuqaq Al-Blat in Beirut killed five people and injured 24,” a ministry statement said, giving an updated death toll.
The official National News Agency (NNA) said an apartment near a Shiite Muslim place of worship had been targeted.
“A hostile drone targeted a residential apartment behind the Husseiniya of Zuqaq Al-Blat in the capital Beirut, causing great damage,” the NNA said.
The air strike was not preceded by a warning from the Israeli military to evacuate.
An AFP correspondent in the area heard two blasts, and said the raid badly damaged the ground floor of a building.
Reporters elsewhere in the city heard ambulance sirens.
The densely populated working class district of Zuqaq Al-Blat has welcomed many displaced people who fled Israeli strikes on south and east Lebanon, as well as south Beirut — areas where the Iran-backed Hezbollah holds sway.
The strike hit near a building housing many displaced Lebanese, the AFP correspondent said.
It was cordoned off by security forces as residents rushed to help in the rescue efforts, he added.
Several hundred meters (yards) away was the site of a similar strike on Sunday, in the Mar Elias neighborhood, which the health ministry said killed three people including a woman.
Israel has not commented on the strikes in central Beirut, but has confirmed that one air raid in the area the killed Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif.
That strike, also on Sunday, hit the Lebanese office of the Syrian Baath party, killing Afif and four other members of his media team, Hezbollah said. The health ministry said seven people were killed in the attack.
Since September 23, Israel has ramped up its air campaign in Lebanon, later sending in ground troops after almost a year of cross-border exchanges begun by Hezbollah over the Gaza war.
Lebanese authorities say more than 3,510 people have been killed since Hezbollah-Israel clashes began in October last year, with most casualties recorded since September.