BEIRUT: Lebanon said Israeli air strikes on Saturday killed more than 55 people, many of them in central Beirut, as Israel’s defence minister vowed decisive action against Hezbollah, in a call with his US counterpart.
On Israel’s second front, the more than 13-month war with Hamas in Gaza, rescuers said pre-dawn Israeli air strikes and tank fire killed 19 people and wounded more than 40 reports AFP.
According to Arab media, Hamas’s said an Israeli hostage, had been killed. Israel’s military said it could neither “confirm nor refute” the claim.
After nearly a year of limited cross-border exchanges of fire, in which Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it was acting in support of Hamas, Israel escalated air strikes against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on September 23.
A week later it sent in ground troops to southern Lebanon.
One strike on Saturday in the heart of Beirut brought down a residential building and jolted residents across the city.
The strike on the working-class Basta neighbourhood killed at least 20 people and wounded 66, Lebanon’s health ministry said in a revised toll.
The attack in the capital was followed by others in the city’s southern suburbs after calls by the Israeli military to evacuate.
Israel has not commented on the strike in central Beirut but said it had again hit Hezbollah targets in the city’s southern suburbs.
A military statement said that over the past week, the air force “struck dozens of Hezbollah command centres, weapons storage facilities, and terrorist infrastructure in the Dahieh area”.
A Lebanese security source told AFP that the central Beirut strike had “targeted a leading Hezbollah figure”, but a Hezbollah lawmaker, Amin Sherri, denied to Lebanese media that any official was present at the time of the attack.
The health ministry said Israeli air strikes also hit eastern Lebanon, killing 24 people including 13 in the town of Shmostar overlooking the Bekaa Valley, another Hezbollah stronghold.
In Lebanon’s south, at least 14 were killed including five in the coastal city of Tyre, the ministry said.
In a telephone call with Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz on Saturday, Washington’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “reiterated US commitment to a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon that allows Israeli and Lebanese civilians to return safely to their homes on both sides of the border”, a Pentagon spokesperson said.
READ ALSO: Israeli Strikes Kill 19 Palestinians in Gaza
United States envoy Amos Hochstein was in Lebanon and Israel this week, meeting with both countries’ senior officials, to try to negotiate an end to the war.
After talks in Beirut he said a deal was “within our grasp” but as he headed to Israel both sides put out statements that dented hopes of rapid progress.
Lebanon says more than 3,670 people have been killed in the country since October 2023. Most of the deaths have been since September this year.
Israel’s attack in Gaza has killed over 44,176 people, most of them women and children, according to data from the Hamas’s health ministry, which the United Nations considers reliable.
In the pre-dawn darkness of Gaza on Saturday, one strike killed seven people including children at a house in the Zeitun area of Gaza City, civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
In southern Gaza, another strike killed six people, three of them children, Bassal said, and civil defence late Saturday said six more were killed in an air strike in Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza.
The trickle of aid entering Gaza was the principal basis cited by the International Criminal Court in the arrest warrants it announced on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, alleging starvation as a method of warfare and other crimes.
