Israeli strike near Beirut kills two as raids target southern suburbs
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BEIRUT: Lebanon said an Israeli strike outside Beirut killed two people on Tuesday (Mar 24) after several strikes on the capital's southern suburbs overnight as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict entered its fourth week.
AFP correspondents saw destruction to an apartment building in Bshamoun, a mixed town in the Aley region, located in the mountains the capital to the southeast, outside of Hezbollah's traditional strongholds.
Abbas Qassem, 55, who owns the apartment next to the one targeted, was weeping at the damage to his flat, which was not occupied at the time.
"There's nothing left. It's all burned or destroyed ... No walls, the windows are gone, the facade is gone, all my hard work has been lost," said Qassem, his wife also crying.
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"What have I done to have my home destroyed? I'm just a normal person," said Qassem, who works for the state telecoms provider.
The health ministry gave a preliminary toll of two dead and five wounded in the strike.
Lebanon was pulled into the Middle East war when Iran-backed Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel on Mar 2 to avenge the killing of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Israel has since launched strikes across Lebanon, killing at least 1,039 people and displacing more than a million others, and sent ground troops into the country's south.
VAST DESTRUCTION
Overnight, Israel repeatedly struck Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway, after the Israeli military had renewed its calls for residents there to evacuate.
On Tuesday morning, an AFP photographer saw vast destruction near the site of one of the strikes in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood, with rubble piled up and debris covering the street.
The state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported strikes overnight and on Tuesday morning on various areas of the country's south, including on several gas stations belonging to the Al-Amana fuel company, which the Israeli army has said finances Hezbollah.
The agency also reported strikes in the Hermel region in the country's far northeast near the border with Syria.
The NNA also said an Israeli army unit carried out an incursion into the southern border town of Halta where the forces "raided a number of homes and opened fire" on locals, reporting one dead and another wounded.
It said the forces "abducted" another resident "before withdrawing from the town".
The Iran-backed Hezbollah claimed a series of attacks on Tuesday including several against Israeli soldiers in the south Lebanon village of Qawzah, as well as at sites in northern Israel.
The NNA reported Israeli shelling on the outskirts of Qawzah and also said the Israeli army destroyed a bridge linking areas in southern Lebanon to the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, a day after Israeli strikes targeted the same bridge.
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