BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanon’s health minister said on Saturday the death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb the day before has risen to 31, including seven women and three children.
Firass Abiad told reporters that 68 people were also wounded of whom 15 remain in hospital, in the deadliest Israeli airstrike on Beirut since the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
The casualties included Ibrahim Akil, a Hezbollah commander who was in charge of the group’s elite Radwan Forces, as well as about a dozen members of the militant group who were meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed. Three Syrian nationals were among the dead, Abiad said.
Late Friday, the Israeli military said the strike killed 11 Hezbollah operatives, including Akil. Hezbollah announced overnight Friday that 15 of its operatives were killed by Israeli forces, but did not elaborate on the location of these deaths.
Israel launched the rare airstrike in the densely populated southern Beirut neighborhood on Friday afternoon during rush hour as people returned home from work and students from schools. On Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene of the airstrike where workers were still digging through the rubble.
Search and rescue operations are still ongoing, Abiad said, with the death toll from the strike likely to rise.
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.
Friday’s deadly strike came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, largely targeting Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets.
The militant group said its latest wave of rocket salvos was a response to past Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. However, it came days after mass explosions of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies killed at least 37 people — including two children. Some 2,900 others were wounded in the assault which has been widely attributed to Israel.
The Lebanese health minister said Saturday hospitals across the country are filled with the wounded.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the attack which marked a major escalation in the past 11 months of simmering conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire regularly since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel ignited the Israeli military’s devastating offensive in Gaza. But previous cross-border attacks have largely struck areas in northern Israel that had been evacuated and less-populated parts of southern Lebanon.
Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet said stopping Hezbollah’s attacks in the country’s north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal, as it considers a wider military operation in Lebanon that could spark an all-out conflict.
The tit-for-tat strikes have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel.