BEIRUT (AP) – The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has risen to 31, including seven women and three children, Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said yesterday.
Abiad told reporters 68 people were also wounded of whom 15 remain in hospital, adding that search and rescue operations were still ongoing, with the number of casualties likely to rise.
The rare strike – the deadliest targeting the Lebanese capital since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war – hit a densely populated southern neighbourhood on Friday afternoon during rush hour as people returned home.
Israel said it killed 11 Hezbollah operatives, including Ibrahim Akil who was in charge of the group’s elite Radwan Force.
The group members were in a meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed.
Hezbollah announced overnight on Friday that 15 of its operatives were killed by Israeli forces, but did not elaborate on the location of these deaths.
Lebanese troops cordoned off the area preventing people from reaching the building that was knocked down as members of the Lebanese Red Cross stood nearby to take any recovered body from under the rubble.
Yesterday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene of the airstrike where workers were still digging through the rubble.
Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamie told reporters at the scene that 23 people are still missing.
The airstrike on the crowded Qaim street knocked out an eight-storey building that had 16 apartments and damaged another one adjacent to it.
The missiles destroyed the first building and cut through the basement of the second where the meeting of Hezbollah officials was being held, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.
