A new series of Israeli raids targeted the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday, the Lebanese news agency Ani reported. A strike caused the collapse of a multi-story building near a busy intersection in the Lebanese capital.
Photos taken by an AFP photographer on the outskirts of the southern suburbs showed a projectile hitting the building on its lower floors, triggering a fireball and the structure collapsing in a cloud of smoke.
The Ani agency reported a “violent raid carried out by Israeli enemy aircraft” on the Ghobeiry district, very close to the Tayouné roundabout, a very lively sector of Beirut, and opposite Horch Beirut , the largest park in the capital.
After the strike, civil defense was dispatched to the site to extinguish a fire in the middle of the smoking rubble, before the intervention of a bulldozer to clear the rubble, according to the AFP photographer.
These strikes come after calls to evacuate the neighborhoods of Ghobeiry and Bourj al-Barajneh, published on X by Avichay Adraee, Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli army, assuring residents that they were “near installations and interests affiliated with Hezbollah.
Emptied suburb
The southern suburbs, one of the strongholds of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement targeted for several weeks by the Israeli army, has been largely emptied of its residents, even if sometimes, during the day, some return to inspect their homes or businesses.
The Ani agency also reported Israeli airstrikes carried out overnight on the town of Nabatiyé (South).
For its part, the Israeli army said Friday morning that the day before it had targeted “command centers” of the elite Hezbollah unit, Al-Radwan, in the Nabatiyé area, as well as rocket launchers which carried out Thursday shooting in northern Israel.
She also indicated that sirens had gone off in northern Israel, particularly in the Bay of Haifa, ensuring that she had intercepted “two projectiles” coming from Lebanon on Friday.
The Israeli army launched an intense bombing campaign in Lebanon on September 23, targeting in particular Hezbollah strongholds, followed by a ground offensive in the south of the country on September 30.
Israel says it wants to neutralize Hezbollah to allow the return of residents of northern Israel, displaced by more than a year of fire from the Lebanese movement, which opened a “support front” for Hamas in October 2023, the day after the outbreak. of the war in Gaza.
Billions of losses
According to a World Bank report published Thursday, Lebanon, already hit by an unprecedented economic crisis, has experienced “economic losses” of more than five billion dollars in just over a year of violence between Hezbollah and Israel.
Since October 8, 2023, the conflict has damaged nearly 100,000 homes, according to the same source.
The war led by Israel in the Gaza Strip broke out on October 7, 2023, the day of the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli territory.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats / afp
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