Middle East crisis live: Israel launches strikes on southern Beirut after US says it opposes ‘scope’ of bombing campaign
IDF says the airstrike targeted an underground Hezbollah weapons storage facility in the Dahiyeh area of southern Beirut
Israeli strikes came just hours after US voiced opposition to scope of attacks on Beirut
The Israeli strikes came just hours after the US said it opposed the scope of Israeli attacks in the Lebanese capital amid a rising death toll and fears of wider regional escalation, Reuters reports.
On Tuesday, state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had expressed its concerns to Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration on the recent strikes.
“When it comes to the scope and nature of the bombing campaign that we saw in Beirut over the past few weeks, it’s something that we made clear to the government of Israel we had concerns with and we were opposed to,” he told reporters, adopting a harsher tone than Washington has taken so far.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati had said on Tuesday his contacts with US officials had produced a “kind of guarantee” that Israel would tamp down strikes on Beirut and its southern suburbs.
The last time Beirut was hit was on 10 October, when two strikes near the city centre killed 22 people and brought down entire buildings in a densely populated neighbourhood. Lebanese security sources said at the time that Hezbollah official Wafiq Safa was the target but that he had survived. There was no comment from Israel.
Israeli military evacuation alerts were also affecting more than a quarter of Lebanon, according to the UN refugee agency, two weeks after Israel began incursions into the south of the country that it says are aimed at pushing back Hezbollah.
Mayor of Lebanon’s Nabatiyeh among dead in Israeli strike on municipality, say officials
The mayor of Nabatiyeh was among those killed on Wednesday in Israeli strikes on the municipality of the southern Lebanese city, where Hezbollah and its ally Amalhold sway, authorities said.
“The mayor of Nabatiyeh, among others … was martyred. It’s a massacre,” Nabatiyeh governor Howaida Turk told Agence France-Presse (AFP), adding he had been in the municipality building.
Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers also told AFP that several people were killed in the strike on the municipality building including mayor Ahmad Kahil.
Wizz Air said on Wednesday that it was suspending flights to and from Tel Aviv until 14 January due to the situation in the region.