Israel has launched a strike on Beirut for the second time in days, further testing the shaky ceasefire with Hezbollah struck four months ago.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said three people were killed, including a woman, and seven injured in the strike early Tuesday, which Israel said had targeted a Hezbollah militant.
Two missiles hit the top three floors of a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon’s national news agency NNA reported. Witnesses told Reuters that no evacuation warning was issued ahead of the strike and that families who lived there have now fled to other parts of the city.
Israel’s military said in a statement the militant had allegedly “recently directed Hamas operatives and assisted them in planning a significant and imminent terror attack against Israeli civilians.”
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun condemned the attack. “Israel’s persistence in its aggression requires us to exert more effort to address Lebanon’s friends around the world and rally them in support of our right to full sovereignty over our land,” he said.
The US State Department said on Tuesday that Israel was defending itself from rocket attacks that came from Lebanon and that Washington blamed “terrorists” for the resumption of hostilities, Reuters reported.
“Hostilities have resumed because terrorists launched rockets into Israel from Lebanon,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email to Reuters, adding Washington supported Israel’s response.
The attack comes just days after Israel launched its first strike on the Lebanese capital since a ceasefire with Hezbollah came into effect in November. Israel accused Hezbollah of launching two rocket attacks from southern Lebanon that crossed Israel’s border, a claim the Iran-backed group denied.
“We will not allow firing on our communities, not even a drizzle … We will attack everywhere in Lebanon against any threat to the state of Israel, and we will ensure that all our residents in the north return to their homes safely,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday.
The Lebanese army called Friday’s strike on the southern Dahieh neighborhood “a blatant and repeated violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and the security of its citizens, a challenge to international law, and a flagrant breach of the ceasefire agreement.”
The US-brokered ceasefire agreement brought about a significant reduction in violence following more than a year of cross-border strikes and months of a full-scale war.
However, Israel has continued to conducted dozens of strikes – mostly in southern Lebanon – on what it calls Hezbollah targets, and maintains a military presence at multiple locations in southern Lebanon, despite having agreed to withdraw as part of the deal.