BEIRUT: Israel unleashed a wave of air strikes on Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold on Wednesday night, Lebanese state media said, as the Iran-Hezbollah war reached its one-month mark.
With six buildings levelled in at least 17 Israeli raids, the strikes mark one of the most brutal nights in the capital’s southern suburbs since the war erupted on September 23.
Separately, Syria’s state media reported Israeli air strikes on a residential building in Damascus and a military site in Homs that killed a soldier and wounded seven others.
The raids came after United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a visit to Israel, told the US ally to avoid further escalation with Iran.
Israel is fighting Iran-backed Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and has vowed to retaliate against Iran for an October 1 missile attack.
In Lebanon, the official National News Agency reported at least 17 Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, calling the raids “the most violent in the area since the beginning of the war.”
Six buildings were destroyed around the suburb of Laylaki, NNA said, including a residential complex hit by four Israeli strikes “causing a large fire.”

AFPTV footage showed a massive explosion followed by smaller blasts in the embattled suburb after the Israeli army issued an Arabic-language evacuation warning for the area, where Hezbollah holds sway.
There was no warning, however, for a strike that hit the Jnah neighborhood in southern Beirut.
That strike killed one person and wounded five others, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

In southern Lebanon, Israeli strikes pounded Tyre, leaving swaths of its center in ruins and sparking a new exodus from the once vibrant coastal city.
“The whole city shook,” said resident Rana, who fled to the seafront after the Israeli military issued an evacuation warning.
Bilal Kashmar of Tyre’s disaster management unit said seven buildings were levelled and more than 400 apartments damaged.
“You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated,” he told AFP.

Black smoke was seen rising from several neighborhoods, with some areas just 500 meters (550 yards) from the city’s ancient ruins.
UNESCO said it was “closely following” the conflict’s impact on Tyre’s World Heritage site.
Blinken’s visit to the region, his 11th since the Gaza war began, was part of continued US efforts to end the war and limit its regional fallout.

The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 42,792 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, data which the UN considers reliable.
Blinken said Israel had “achieved most of its strategic objectives” in Gaza and should now aim for lasting success.
“Now is the time to turn those successes into enduring, strategic success,” he said after meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials.

Addressing Israel’s pledge to retaliate for Iran’s October 1 attack, he said: “It’s also very important that Israel respond in ways that do not create greater escalation.”
After Israel, Blinken visited Saudi Arabia, renewing his bid to broker a normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Speaking at a summit in Russia, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian urged BRICS nations to help “end the war” in Gaza and Lebanon.
A Hamas official said a delegation led by a top official in the movement arrived in Moscow for talks.

Concerns are mounting over tens of thousands of civilians trapped by fighting in Gaza’s aid-starved north, where Israel launched a major air and ground assault this month.
Blinken acknowledged “progress” on aid for Gaza but said more needed to be done.
With winter approaching, displaced Gazans fear the cold.
Ahmad Al-Razz said he sewed sacks together to make his tent on the beach near Deir el-Balah.
“We are freezing every night because we are right by the sea, and we have no blankets or coverings to keep us warm,” said the 42-year-old.
The World Health Organization said it was forced to postpone the last phase of a polio vaccination drive in Gaza due to “intense bombardment” in the north.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said another of its workers had been killed in Gaza after a strike hit an UNRWA vehicle.
An AFP photographer reported a strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis, leaving a mangled aid truck and mourners gathered around two bodies.

After nearly a year of war with Hamas in Gaza, Israel shifted its focus to Lebanon last month, vowing to secure its northern border under fire from Hezbollah.
Israel has since ramped up its strikes on Hezbollah strongholds and sent in ground forces, in a war that has killed at least 1,580 people since September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.
The real number is likely to be higher due to gaps in the data.
Lebanese media said Israeli strikes hit areas of south and east Lebanon on Wednesday.
In the evening, pro-Iran broadcaster Al-Mayadeen said an Israeli strike hit an office it had vacated in Beirut.
Hezbollah said it had fired rockets in several areas of Israel, including a salvo that forced Israeli troops to “retreat behind the frontier” after they attempted to infiltrate from the outskirts of the south Lebanon village of Aitarun.
The Israeli army said air raid sirens sounded across central Israel after “projectiles” were fired from across the Lebanese border.
Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israel had uncovered that Hezbollah had been plotting an “attack even greater than on October 7” involving jeeps, missiles and underground tunnels.
“They were planning an invasion,” the premier told French broadcasters CNews and Europe 1.
Also on Wednesday, Hezbollah confirmed the death of Hashem Safieddine, a cleric tipped to succeed the group’s slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, a day after Israel announced Safieddine’s death.
A Western diplomat meanwhile told AFP a number of Western countries had floated the idea of deploying international forces to Lebanon in the event of a ceasefire.
About 10,000 UN peacekeepers are already deployed in Lebanon’s south, but the diplomat said a separate multi-national troop deployment was under consideration.
 

ANKARA: Turkiye said it launched strikes on Kurdish militants in Iraq and Syria Wednesday after blaming them for an attack that killed five people at a defense firm near Ankara.
A further 22 people were wounded in the attack, which the government said was “very likely” carried out by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Hours later, “an air operation was carried out against terrorist targets in the north of Iraq and Syria,” the defense ministry said in a statement.
“A total of 32 targets belonging to the terrorists were successfully destroyed,” it said, adding that operations were continuing.
Listed as a terror group by Turkiye and its Western allies, the PKK has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. It has a number of rear bases in Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria.
In the attack that sparked the strikes, a huge explosion rocked the headquarters of state-run Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) some 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Ankara shortly after 3:30 pm.
It sent clouds of smoke into the air as the sound of gunfire rang out, Turkish media reported, with the incident quickly denounced by Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya as a “terror attack.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was in Russia for talks with Vladimir Putin, called it a “heinous” attack on Turkiye’s defense industry “targeting the survival of our country,” in a message on X.

Yerlikaya said three of the injured were in critical condition and that the two attackers, “a woman and a man,” had been “neutralized.”
There was no immediate claim for the attack but Yerlikaya said: “The way in which this action was carried out is very probably linked to the PKK.”

He said efforts to identify the perpetrators of the attack were ongoing.
Defense Minister Yasar Guler also pointed the finger at “PKK villains.”
“As they always do, they tried to disturb our nation’s peace through a despicable and dishonorable attack... we will make them suffer for what they have done,” he said.
Turkiye’s vice president Cevdet Yilmaz said four of the victims were TAI employees while the fifth was a taxi driver. Media reports earlier said the assailants had killed him and taken his taxi to carry out the attack.

An unconfirmed report by private channel NTV said a “group of terrorists” had burst into the building, one of whom “blew himself up” while other outlets reported exchanges of fire for more than an hour.
Haberturk TV said there was a “hostage situation,” with another media pundit saying “a number of hostages” had been rescued.
Turkish authorities imposed a blackout of live images from the scene.
Sabah newspaper published what it said was a CCTV image from the entrance showing a black-clad young man with a moustache carrying a rucksack and what appeared to be an assault rifle.
As night fell, dozens of ambulances could be seen waiting in convoy near the site, their blue lights flashing.
One of Turkiye’s top defense firms and a major arms producer, TAI employs 15,500 people and has a vast production site covering an area of five million square meters, its website says.
The attack drew condemnation from across Turkiye and beyond, with Putin offering Erdogan his “condolences in connection with the terror attack” at the start of their meeting.
Statements of condemnation and condolences to the families of the victims also poured in from Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Tehran and Washington and NATO leadership.

The attack came as Turkiye’s political establishment appeared to be leaning toward a political, negotiated solution to the decades-long conflict with the Kurdish militants.
The timing was not lost on the main pro-Kurdish party, Dem, the third largest force in parliament, which said it was “noteworthy that the attack took place just as Turkish society was talking about a solution and the possibility of dialogue.”
It took place a day after the head of the far-right MHP, which belongs to Erdogan’s ruling coalition, invited jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to address parliament to announce his movement’s dissolution.
The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, claiming tens of thousands of lives, with Ocalan held in solitary confinement on a prison island since 1999.