Israel strikes Lebanon’s Beirut again; Hezbollah launches drones at Israel

Israel has bombed Lebanon’s capital Beirut for the second consecutive day as Hezbollah claimed an attack on an airbase in northern Israel, with another front in the regional war sparked by United States-Israel attacks on Iran igniting.

New Israeli air raids on Tuesday hit the Haret Hreik area of Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh after at least two more attacks on the city’s outskirts.
The Israeli military said its troops “are operating in southern Lebanon” as it continues strikes.

It also issued forced displacement notices for some 59 areas in Lebanon, including several neighbourhoods in Dahiyeh, traditionally home to more of the Shia population, seen as a support base for Hezbollah.

In a post on the Telegram messaging app, it said it was striking “Hezbollah command centres and weapons storage facilities in Beirut”.

Civilians across Lebanon are continually caught in the crosshairs of Israeli attacks in Lebanon and have suffered thousands of deaths and mass displacement during the yearlong war in 2023-24 and in subsequent near-daily Israeli violations of a ceasefire up until the eruption of this new conflict days ago.

Al Jazeera’s Heidi Pett, reporting from Beirut, said this resulted in “a wave of displacement”. “We’ve seen civilians making their way out of there from the second these strikes began.”

“This morning, schoolchildren are not heading to schools in Beirut because many of them are closed in order to take in the thousands and thousands of people who have been displaced from the southern suburbs.”
Hezbollah earlier said it had launched an attack on the Ramat David airbase in northern Israel, targeting radar sites and control rooms at the base by deploying “a swarm of drones” at dawn on Tuesday.

The Lebanese group added that it carried out the attack in retaliation against Israel’s strikes in several areas of Lebanon.

On Monday, Israeli strikes on Beirut’s suburbs and southern Lebanon killed at least 52 people and injured 154, according to state-run media. The air raids came after Hezbollah fired a barrage of missiles and drones towards an Israeli military site in the northern city of Haifa for the first time in more than a year.

The Lebanese government declared the “military activities” of Hezbollah, which acts independently from the state, illegal and called upon the security forces to “prevent any attacks originating from Lebanese territory”.

Hezbollah said the ban was not justified. “We understand the Lebanese government’s impotence in the face of the brutal Zionist enemy, which violates national sovereignty, occupies land, and poses a continuous threat to the country’s security and stability,” the group said, adding that it is the government’s right “to decide on war and peace”.

“However, given this clear weakness and deficiency, we see no justification for Prime Minister [Nawaf] Salam and his government to take such aggressive measures against the Lebanese who reject the occupation,” it said.