Lebanese media say Israeli forces carried out more than 30 air raids overnight across Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Massive explosions have rocked the Lebanese capital, marking the “most violent night” of attacks since Israel expanded its military offensive against Lebanon on September 23.
Israeli warplanes carried out more than 30 overnight air raids on southern suburbs of Beirut, with a huge fireball lighting up the night sky and plumes of smoke rising early on Sunday.
After a devastating yearlong war in Gaza, Israel has now shifted its focus northwards to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based group allied with the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said a Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut was hit by more than 30 strikes, which were heard across the city. The targets included a petrol station and a hotel near the city’s Rafic Hariri international airport.
The number of casualties from the latest Israeli strikes could not be immediately determined.
Israel’s military said it “conducted a series of strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities” and infrastructure, stressing “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.
media’s Ali Hashem, reporting from Beirut, said the city experienced a different level of “intensity, velocity and weight” of explosions, with the strikes centred in an area near the airport.
“Day after day, the level of the intensity of the bombardment is ascending. It is becoming another Gaza with the way the Israeli strikes are hitting,” he said.
“There are so many people sheltering on the streets, thousands of them, in the beach, the parks and tens of thousands in schools,” he added. “The [Lebanese] government is unable to deal with this situation.”
The overnight strikes came hours after a Lebanese security source told media that Hezbollah had lost contact with one of its senior leaders, Hashem Safieddine, who was seen as a possible successor to slain leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Safieddine, chairman of Hezbollah’s executive council, is also a cousin of Nasrallah, who was killed in an intense Israeli strike on Beirut on September 27.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine so far.
‘Another Gaza’
But in response to the latest attacks, the Lebanese armed group launched retaliatory strikes, firing three salvoes of rockets and missiles at Israeli soldiers in Manara in northern Israel.
On Saturday, it made its first strike in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, killing Saeed Attallah Ali, a senior leader of Hamas’s armed wing Qassam Brigades, alongside his wife and their two daughters.
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