Israel’s air force conducted a large strike on a building in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital on Friday (Mar 28), a Reuters reporter said, the first heavy bombardment there since a truce deal in November ended a war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Israel’s military said it hit a drone storage facility in the area belonging to Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.
The strike, which was heard across Beirut and produced a large column of black smoke, followed an evacuation order by the Israeli military for the neighbourhood and three smaller targeted drone strikes on the building intended as warning shots, security sources told Reuters.
The evacuation order sent residents of the area into a panic, rushing to escape on foot as traffic clogged the streets out of the area, Reuters reporters in the area said.
Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold known as Dahiyeh, were pounded last year by Israeli strikes that killed many of the group’s top leaders, including its powerful chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a September air attack.
A US-brokered truce in November put an end to the fighting and mandated that southern Lebanon be free of Hezbollah fighters and weapons, that Lebanese troops deploy to the area and that Israeli ground troops withdraw from the zone.
But the truce has been shaken over the last week by two cases of outgoing fire from southern Lebanon – several rockets fired on Mar 22 and another set fired on Friday morning.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said the Lebanese government bore direct responsibility for the attack and said that as long as there was no peace in Galilee “there will be no peace in Beirut either.”
Israeli ministers have vowed to ensure that the tens of thousands of Israelis who evacuated their homes in border areas when Hezbollah began bombarding the area in 2023 would be able to return safely.
But with more Israeli units deployed around Gaza, where a separate ceasefire has also broken down, it remained unclear whether Israel was prepared for any wider intervention.
