An Israeli strike hit an apartment building in central Beirut on Wednesday, state media reported, the second targeting of the heart of the Lebanese capital since the Middle East war began.
Lebanon was drawn into the war last week when Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes.
Israel, which had kept up strikes targeting Hezbollah even before the war despite a 2024 ceasefire, has launched attacks across Lebanon and sent ground troops into border areas.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said that “the enemy targeted an apartment in the Aisha Bakkar area” in central Beirut, a densely populated neighbourhood close to one of the city’s biggest shopping malls.
AFPTV’s live broadcast showed the sound of an air strike followed by a fireball erupting in an apartment within a multi-storey residential building in Beirut. There was no immediate confirmation of any casualties.
An AFP correspondent saw destroyed walls in a building’s seventh and eighth floors with damaged cars nearby and security forces present at the scene.
When the strike hit “I ran from room to room, pulled my wife and daughter out of the rooms and hid them behind a wall, then the second strike hit”, said Fawzi Asmar, owner of a bakery in the street where the strike took place.
Samer Knio, a civil defence paramedic, said glass and debris fell on his team as they were evacuating the dead and wounded from the scene, “but God protected us”.
Last week the Israeli army targeted a hotel in central Beirut, with Iran saying that strike killed four of its diplomats.
