- Heavy strikes shake southern Beirut
- Weekend strikes come ahead of anniversary of Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel
Israeli air attacks battered Beirut's southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Hezbollah last month.During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometres away.It was the single biggest attack of Israel's assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area."Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes - we couldn't count them all - and the sounds were deafening," said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj al-Barajneh area in Beirut's southern suburbs.Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.Israel said its air force had "conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah in the area of Beirut".Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.This weekend's intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel.The target of Israel's airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh - considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees - killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah's potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city's international airport that was reported to have targeted him.Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.His loss would be another blow to the group. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah's leadership.Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.Israel has been weighing options for its response.