Israel misses target as 22 killed in deadliest Beirut air strike of the war

Wafiq Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, survives assassination attempt

Two Israeli air strikes killed 22 people and injured more than 100 in central Beirut, Lebanese authorities said, as a senior Hezbollah official dodged an assassination attempt.
The strikes hit a residential neighbourhood of apartment buildings and small shops late on Thursday and marked the deadliest attacks on the city since the start of the war.
The target was reported to be Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s liaison and coordination unit responsible for working with Lebanese security agencies, but he survived, sources told Reuters. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television said he was not in the building at the time.
Israel has dramatically stepped up its air campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, saying it wants to secure its northern cities from barrages of rockets fired across the border, so that residents can go home.
Rescue workers were still trawling through rubble at the scene in Beirut on Friday morning.
A three-storey building in the Burj Abi Haidar neighborhood was flattened and one next door was badly damaged.
Ahmad al-Khatib, a postal worker, stood in the apartment of his in-laws where he, his wife, Marwa Hamdan, and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ayla, were injured.
“The world suddenly turned upside down and darkness prevailed,” the 42-year-old told Associated Press.
He pulled his daughter from under the debris of a collapsed bedroom wall and fortunately she suffered only minor injuries.
His wife was hit in the head by a piece of metal and remained in intensive care.
Hezbollah began rocket barrages into Israel the day after the Hamas Oct 7 attacks, drawing air strikes in retaliation.
Israel stepped up its campaign three weeks ago, then also began a ground offensive to push Hezbollah away from the border to allow evacuated citizens to return home.
Israel’s military says more than 12,000 rockets, missiles and drones have been launched at Israel from Lebanon in the past year.
More than 2,100 Lebanese have been killed in the same period by Israeli strikes, two thirds of them in the past three weeks. Lebanese authorities do not disclose how many were combatants or civilians.
Lebanon’s civil defence units – which in peacetime fight fires, respond to road accidents and conduct rescues – are now each day pulling people from the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Saad al Ahmar, who oversees a unit of 100 staff and 150 volunteers east of the capital and has been employed in civil defence for 37 years, said his men had been working round the clock.
He said he had not slept in his own bed for at least three weeks, resting on a sofa in his office instead.
Mr Ahmar: “We work 24 hours. In the past three weeks, we haven’t been sleeping or eating and we haven’t had time for anything. After every air strike, we have to be there. We have to look for missing people, we have to move bodies and put out fires.”
As he spoke, clearly exhausted and with big bags under his eyes, he was constantly interrupted by phone calls from his rescue teams.
He said civil defence units had evacuated their bases in Beirut’s southern suburbs where many of the Israeli strikes had landed, after telephone warnings from Israel to leave. They now based themselves outside and rushed in after each strike, he said.
He insisted that “99 per cent” of those his men had pulled from the rubble were civilians.
He recalled one strike where his men had been unable to find the remains of a young woman missing in the rubble. Every few days he received a new voice message from her mother, pleading with him to send his men back to search again.