It all started with huge, almost simultaneous explosions this Thursday (10). Then ambulance sirens rang throughout the city as Beirut’s heart ached Deadliest Israeli attacks in nearly three weeks marked by the rhythm of bombings over a southern neighborhood.
In the popular and overcrowded Basta district, the three or four floors of two old buildings collapsed like a house of cards, targets of the now open war between Israel and the pro-Iranian movement Hezbollah.
In another attack, the target was a new eight-story building in the Al Noueiri neighborhood. Hassan Jaber was taking out the trash from his apartment when he was hit. “I just opened the elevator door and I hurt my leg and arm,” he told AFPstill stunned by the explosion. “I fell and saw everyone running away.”
Ayman, a resident who lives across the street and who declined to give his last name, said he heard “three explosions.” “The kitchen windows shattered. We are on the other side of the street and my son started crying,” he added.
Firefighters were working to put out the fire that was consuming a residential property, and were trying to evacuate residents through a large staircase.
Equipped with large flashlights amid rubble and crushed vehicles, rescuers, wearing yellow and red vests, used shovels to remove the mud that formed when the pipes broke.
‘As if trembling on the ground’
“Attention, there’s a hole there”, someone warned a Civil Defense officer.
With heavy machines, rescuers tried to clear the land while, nearby, there were injured people lying on the sides of the road and residents hurriedly fled, carrying only a bag with belongings.
Heavy machinery and Lebanese firefighters try to contain a fire and find survivors and bodies in the rubble of buildings bombed by Israel.
Photo: AFP
Around the buildings with marks from the explosions – apartments without walls and balconies ready to collapse – Hezbollah troops and Lebanese soldiers maintained a closed security cordon in this mixed neighborhood, where Shiite and Sunni Muslims live.
“I’m not usually afraid, but it was like the earth shook,” said a man, less than a kilometer from the site of the attack. Five minutes away, in the Christian neighborhood of Achrafiyeh, families still in shock from the huge explosions say they felt them as if they had occurred right there.
On Thursday night, a Lebanese security force indicated that the target was a senior Hezbollah leader, without being able to identify him. The current balance is 22 deaths and 117 injured, according to the Ministry of Health of the Lebanon.
For a year now, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire on the border, with more than 2,000 deaths in total. Since September 23, when bombings intensified in eastern Lebanon and southern Beirut, around 1,200 people have died and almost 1 million have had to leave their homes, according to a report by the AFP made from official numbers.
On September 27, Israeli bombings killed the then leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallahin a neighborhood in the south of the capital. This Thursday’s attack was the third by Israeli aviation on Beirut since September 23.
A photo of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader killed by Israel, is displayed amid war debris in Beirut, Lebanon.
Photo: AFP
Another attack, which occurred in early October, targeted Hezbollah’s emergency services, killing seven rescuers. On September 30, three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) died in another Israeli action.
