Israel continues Lebanon bombing spree with deadly attack in heart of Beirut
Beirut, Lebanon - Israel hit a Beirut apartment block on Monday, killing three people in its first strike on the city center since the outbreak of the war on Gaza last year.
Israel has shifted the focus of its violence from Gaza to Lebanon in recent days, carrying out brutal bombardments that have killed over 1,000 people.
Monday's drone attack targeted a "flat belonging to Jamaa Islamiya," a Lebanese Islamist group, a security source said.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular left-wing group, said three of its members were killed in Monday's strike on Beirut's Kola district.
Having killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, in airstrikes that leveled an entire city block on Friday, the Israeli military said it had launched fresh strikes on dozens of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon's Bekaa region on Monday, as well as attacks on Tyre that killed Hamas' leader in Lebanon, Fatah Sharif, and his entire family.
Meanwhile, TV footage showed the partially flattened floor of the building targeted by the strike, in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Kola, near the road linking the capital to Beirut airport.
Lebanese authorities have said that the vast majority of those killed are civilians, while Israel's aggression risks displacing some one million people in scenes increasingly reminiscent of the destruction wrought in Gaza.
While world leaders called for a de-escalation to avoid a wider regional conflict, Israel over the weekend broadened its bombing campaign to Yemen and Syria, while a campaign increasingly adjudged to be genocidal continues unabated in Gaza, where well over 41,000 people have been killed.
Cover photo: REUTERS