There is a crushed pile of rubble where a nine-storey building once stood in Beirut.
It’s all that’s left after an Israeli missile ripped through it.
Nearly 20 families had lived in the apartment block – almost certainly there would have been plenty of children among them too.
All around there are other high-rise residential buildings, many of them showing serious signs of degradation from the missile impact.
On the other side, a huge hole had appeared underneath a second building. Multiple exterior walls had disappeared exposing in one case rows of women’s clothing still hanging on a shop rack.
Israel is now fighting on two fronts – both Gaza and Lebanon – and there are few signs there will be any let-up soon.
In fact, all the actions seem to point to a whole lot more death and destruction ahead.
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The rare Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese capital, Beirut, has taken the fight against Hezbollah to a new level.
Two very senior key Hezbollah commanders were killed alongside a group of their elite Radwan Force team.
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There’s no doubt that losing such long-standing and experienced personnel who were at the heart of the group’s military structure is a massive blow to the fighting group.
The Israeli authorities are clearly delighted, saying the attack had resulted in “almost completely dismantling” the Hezbollah military chain of command.
But in launching a strike in the heart of a busy, densely-populated residential area, dozens of civilians have also been killed, among them women and children.
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Lebanese government ministers have spent the best part of a year urging restraint from Hezbollah after the group unilaterally entered the war in support of Gaza on 8 October.
But this third major Israeli attack on Lebanon inside a week has unleashed a torrent of frustration and condemnation – and driven calls for tougher international pressure on their neighbour.
Lebanon’s defence minister Maurice Sleem told us from the scene of the blast site in Beirut’s Dahieh suburb: “Children and women have been killed in this attack and this is not acceptable. It is a war crime by any standards…no matter how you measure it, it is a war crime.”
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Aftermath of IDF strike on Lebanon
The energy minister Walid Fayad also denounced the attack, saying there was no justification for it.
“The targeting of a military person does not justify killing 30 civilians,” he said.
“And the way it was done…it’s more than collateral damage…it was deliberate in killing everyone in that building.”
The number of people dead from the earlier back-to-back days of booby-trapped communication devices exploding is still rising with the latest figure announced by the country’s health ministry now at 70.
Among the dead are at least two children.
Around three thousand others are wounded with life-changing injuries from those attacks.
Lebanon’s prime minister is heading to New York where a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly is taking place to call for support and help to try to prevent the situation from escalating further.
Yet even as the appeals for calm came flooding in from diplomats across the globe, down south from Beirut, on the Lebanon-Israel border there have been some of the most intense exchanges of fire in nearly a year.
At one stage the Lebanese state news agency said Israeli jets carried out more than a hundred airstrikes in an hour on Saturday – while Hezbollah fired a volley of around a hundred rocket and drone attacks on communities in the north of Israel.
And the dramatic escalation between Israel and Hezbollah is inextricably linked to Gaza – which suffered another terribly bloody day.
Israeli jets bombed a school in the Al-Zaytoun area of Gaza City packed with people who had fled other bombings.
The Palestinian civil defence agency said the deaths were already 22 but they expected that to rise – and the bulk of the victims were women and children.
The Gaza health ministry called it a “horrific massacre” while the Israeli forces insisted they had struck a Hamas command and control centre without providing any evidence.
The pavements on the perimeter of the Israeli airstrike in Beirut are still filled with anxious relatives and friends waiting for news of loved ones.
At the time of writing nearly two dozen people were still missing.
Emergency workers who had already worked through one night searching through the rubble looked sweaty and tired.
“I don’t think there’s anyone left alive,” said one of the rescue team to us.
“We are slowly going through the rubble in case there is, but I don’t think so now,” said engineer Ali Harake.
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The noisy ambulance sirens which had sounded most of the night and early morning had died down by early afternoon Saturday.
A Hezbollah representative from the municipality warned the fighting group’s response would be “soon”.
“I don’t know [if there will be an all-out regional war], Ahmad Hatoum, told us.
“This is not our goal,” He paused.
“Israel should ceasefire in Gaza. They should stop killing civilian people in Gaza.”
Additional reporting from Beirut with camera Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham, Lebanon producers Jihad Jneid and Hwaida Saad.
Source : Sky News
