Israel strikes central Beirut as attacks escalate

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Israel has struck central Beirut for the first time in a year of fighting, hitting an apartment building and killing members of a Palestinian faction as it continues to expand its offensive against adversaries across the region.

The strike in the Kola bridge area of Beirut in the early hours of Monday marks the first time Israel has hit deep inside the Lebanese capital since the war between Israel and Hizbollah in 2006. It appeared to target a specific apartment, videos from the scene showed, and killed three leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to the group.

It follows days of Israeli strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut that have killed dozens of top commanders of the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militant group, including its influential leader Hassan Nasrallah, but marks the first hit within the city limits of the Lebanese capital.

The Israeli military has not commented on the late-night strike but said it continued to launch attacks overnight on Hizbollah targets in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon after its fighter jets on Sunday hit multiple sites in Yemen linked to the Houthi rebels, dramatically widening its offensive against the allied Iranian-backed groups.

Over the past two weeks, Israel’s offensive has killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, causing panic across the nation and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee, according to the Lebanese health ministry. More than 100 people were killed on Sunday alone.

Up to 1mn people may have been displaced by Israeli bombings in Lebanon, Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Sunday, adding that the numbers were likely to have gone far beyond those recorded in official shelters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was in the process of “changing the balance of power” in the Middle East and vowed to keep up its offensive on multiple fronts.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Monday that one of its leaders in Lebanon had been killed in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp near the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.

In Yemen, Israeli warplanes targeted power plants, ports and other infrastructure in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, a Houthi rebel stronghold, as well as Ras Issa, after Israel’s military on Saturday intercepted a missile launched from Yemen over central Israel for the third time this month.

The Houthis have launched missiles and drones at Israel, merchant ships and US naval vessels in the Red Sea since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza.

Videos from central Beirut on Monday showed rubble strewn across a busy street as ambulances raced to the scene. The Palestinian militant faction PFLP, whose members were killed in the strike, is designated a terrorist group by the US, EU and UK.

Netanyahu has insisted Israel will continue its offensive against Hizbollah and its allies until the more than 60,000 people displaced from Israel’s north by a year of cross-border fire are able to return home, despite calls by the US and other western powers for Israel to de-escalate.

US President Joe Biden on Sunday said he planned to speak to Netanyahu. When asked if an all-out war in the Middle East could be avoided, he replied: “It has to be.”

EU foreign ministers will hold an emergency crisis meeting via video conference on Monday afternoon, officials said, to devise a joint response to the spiralling crisis.

Mikati said the state was doing its utmost given its available resources to deal with what he called the “largest displacement in the region, in Lebanon and even in history”.

Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut