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Israel’s military conducted multiple heavy air strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight, in one of the most violent air raids on the Lebanese capital in Israel’s intensifying campaign against armed group Hizbollah.
Residents across Beirut heard several large blasts, and large plumes of smoke were seen rising from the southern suburb of Dahiyeh in the early hours of Friday. News footage from the area showed billowing smoke with flames rising all around.
Unconfirmed Israeli media reports suggested the strike targeted Hashem Safieddine, the heir apparent to Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader killed in a massive strike on Dahiyeh last week. Safieddine, a fellow cleric and cousin of Nasrallah, was thought to have been groomed for the job in recent years. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
The blasts appeared on a similar scale to the attack that killed Nasrallah. Most of Dahiyeh’s hundreds of thousands of residents have fled the relentless Israeli bombardment of the area in recent days.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since last October, the majority in the past two weeks, Lebanon’s health minister said. More than 1.2mn people have been displaced, triggering one of the worst crises for the country in decades.
The Israel Defense Forces also said its air force had “eliminated” Mahmoud Yusef Anisi, who they said was a key leader in Hizbollah’s manufacture of precision guided missiles, in a strike in Beirut earlier in the week.
Hizbollah has not commented on the IDF claim. Anisi’s death, if confirmed, would be the latest blow to the Lebanese militant group, which has suffered a series of debilitating losses in recent weeks, including the killing of Nasrallah.
Israel’s escalating offensive in Lebanon against Hizbollah, which is backed by Iran, has raised concerns of triggering an all-out conflict in the Middle East. Iran this week launched a ballistic missile barrage against Israel, drawing threats of retaliation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has also intensified its raids in the occupied West Bank in recent weeks and on Thursday carried out an air strike in Tulkarem that the Palestinian health ministry said had killed at least 18 people, in one of the deadliest strikes in the territory since the start of the war. Israel said it had targeted Hamas’s leader in the city, Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi.
In a statement on Thursday evening, the G7 said it was “deeply concerned about the situation in Lebanon” and called for “a cessation of hostilities as soon as possible to create space for a diplomatic solution” and for “all actors to protect civilian populations”.
“The only path to durably de-escalate tensions, stabilise the Israel-Lebanon border, fully restore the sovereignty, territorial integrity and stability of Lebanon, and return displaced citizens to their homes with safety and security on both sides,” the statement said.
The latest strikes came after Israel said it bombed more than a dozen Hizbollah targets in Beirut on Thursday. It killed at least nine people at a Hizbollah-linked medical facility in the heart of Lebanon’s capital in one strike and destroyed a building used by the militant group’s media office in another.
The attacks suggested that Israel was expanding its offensive beyond military targets to include Hizbollah’s civil infrastructure. The movement is Lebanon’s dominant political force and has a huge network of social programmes and business interests.
Israel also continued to bomb tracts of southern Lebanon, having issued evacuation orders for 25 more villages. Residents were warned to move north of the Awali river, which runs as much as 60km from the border with Israel.
The latest warnings took the number of southern areas subject to evacuation calls to 70.
At least 37 people were killed and 151 more were wounded in Israeli attacks across the country in the past 24 hours, Lebanon’s health ministry said late on Thursday.
Hizbollah also said it had repelled several land operations by Israeli troops, including with ambushes and in direct clashes.