Just before 4 a.m. local time, while much of the city was asleep, Beirut was hit by another major Israeli airstrike, reportedly targeting a Hezbollah official who was among four people killed in the attack. Lebanon’s health ministry said a woman was also killed in the attack.
The attacks in the southern suburbs of Beirut destroyed the upper floors of a multi-storey building. The following are believed to have been killed, AFP has identified:
A source close to Hezbollah, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told AFP that Hassan Bdair, Hezbollah’s deputy head of the Palestinian affairs department, was killed in the attack and was “at home with his family.”
Although Al Mayadeen has described Bdair as a Hezbollah rank-and-file member, other regional sources have indicated that he was a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 3900 and the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The Israeli army then announced on Tuesday that fighters “attacked a Hezbollah terrorist in the Dahiye area of Beirut who had recently been leading Hamas operatives and helping them to carry out a serious attack against Israeli civilians in the near future.”
“We couldn’t see each other because of all the dust,” one witness who lives across the street from the destroyed building told AFP, describing a “very big explosion” followed by another.
“It’s not just one person who is being targeted – everyone in the country, from young to old, has become a target,” said another resident of nearby Lebanon.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun warned that war was returning to Lebanon and called on Israel to stop these attacks, which he said indicated Israel’s desire to provoke an escalation.
“The Israeli raid on the southern suburbs is a serious warning of the intentions lurking against Lebanon. Israel’s persistence in its aggression requires us to make more efforts to reach out to and rally our friends in Lebanon to support our right to full sovereignty over our land … to prevent violations from abroad or invaders from home who provide an additional pretext for invasion,” Aoung said.
Journalists and residents in Lebanon, as well as in the region, are outraged because the major airstrikes took place without warning, in the middle of the night, and in a densely populated residential area…
Moreover, it happened on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Ramadan fasting period. A few days ago, rockets were fired from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, resulting in Israeli counterattacks. Hezbollah denied being behind the launch, and the Lebanese government announced the arrest of the perpetrators in order to avoid war.
