Middle East

Beirut missile strike aftermath: A region ‘on the brink of catastrophe’

A southern Beirut neighbourhood is reeling from an Israeli airstrike, as bombardments intensify

Rescuers clear the rubble as they look for survivors at the site of an Israeli missile strike in Beirut on Friday. Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP
Rescuers clear the rubble as they look for survivors at the site of an Israeli missile strike in Beirut on Friday. Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP
Hannah McCarthy
Sun Sept 22 2024 - 16:16

A digger grappled with the piles of rubble: all that was left of two multistorey buildings in Dahiye, a densely populated neighbourhood and Hizbullah stronghold in southern Beirut.

The residential buildings were targeted with four missiles on Friday after the Israeli military learnt that Hizbullah was holding a meeting including two high-ranking commanders of the Iran-backed paramilitary group in a room below ground.

One local resident said the force of the strikes, which the Israeli military immediately claimed responsibility for, violently shook their apartment several streets away. On Sunday, 51 people had been confirmed dead, among them Hizbullah commanders Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmed Wehbe, 14 Hizbullah fighters, seven women and three children.

When The Irish Times visited the site the morning after the strike, a small group of locals were sitting, mostly in silence, a street away from the blast site, waiting for news of loved ones missing under the rubble.

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Closer to the blast site, volunteers from the Lebanese Red Cross were on-standby with ambulances to transport victims but a civil defence worker said: “No one’s expected to be found alive at this point.”

Hours later, five members of the Hamdane and four members of the Dakdouki family were found dead under the rubble. Several more people remain missing, and remains found at the strike site have been taken for DNA tasking, according to the Lebanese ministry of health.

The Hizbullah-appointed public works and transportation minister Ali Hamieh visited the blast site in Dahiye on Saturday afternoon and told media present that the bombing of a residential building constituted a “war crime” and that Israel was “dragging the region into a war”.

A short drive from the blast site in Dahiye, a funeral was held at Ghobeiry for three of the Hizbullah members killed in Friday’s strike. Despite walkie-talkies detonating at a funeral held on Wednesday, thousands of mourners turned out on Saturday, including some men with visible and fresh injuries to their eyes and hands.

After prayers and chants in support of Imam Hussein, Hizbullah and Palestine, the three coffins draped in the group’s bright yellow flag were carried through the crowds.

The Israeli strike on Friday represents yet another security breach in a week of devastating and disorientating blows for Hizbullah. Hundreds of the group’s members were injured and some permanently maimed in two waves of detonation from rigged communication devices used by Hizbullah which killed at least 39.

On Saturday night, Israeli forces struck dozens of targets in southern and eastern Lebanon in an intensive bombardment, killing at least one, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Hours later on Sunday morning, Hizbullah fired more than 150 rockets, cruise missiles and drones into Israel targeting a military base and an airport near the northern Israeli city of Haifa. The barrage of missiles was the deepest attack yet into Israeli territory since the war began.

Amid heavy security, a funeral for Aqil, who spearheaded Hizbollah’s elite infantry unit known as the Radwan Forces, took place on Sunday in southern Beirut. Hizbullah’s deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, made an address to thousands of mourners who sat on plastic chairs or stood along a closed-off street. Qassem said Hizbullah had entered a new phase of its long-simmering conflict with Israel that he described as an “open-ended battle of reckoning”.

Several airlines have cancelled flights to Beirut, while in a statement on Sunday, the UN Envoy to Lebanon, Jeanine Harris, described the region on “the brink of an imminent catastrophe”.