BEIRUT (AP) — Israel’s intense barrage of airstrikes on Wednesday hit without warning deep inside the Lebanese capital of Beirut, blowing buildings open to the elements and reducing apartment blocks to rubble in parts of the city that have traditionally escaped attack.
It was not immediately clear what was targeted. The Israeli military later claimed that Iran-backed Hezbollah had repositioned to residential and commercial areas far from the Shiite militia’s usual sphere of influence on the city’s southern outskirts, where the group’s yellow flags appear on lampposts and Israeli evacuation orders have been in place for weeks.
The areas targeted in this wave of Israeli strikes included busy commercial strips, crowded residential neighborhoods and upscale districts along the city’s seafront — places that had felt somewhat removed from the violence of the Israel-Hezbollah war of the past five weeks, save for the incessant buzz of Israeli drones and thunder of occasional explosions.
One strike hit along Corniche al-Mazraa, a main artery of the city, razing an apartment building near a popular shop selling nuts and dried fruit and setting parked cars ablaze, some with drivers inside. Another crashed into the hilly residential district of Tallet El Khayat, flattening a multi-story building near an upscale mall.
Yet another struck the seaside district of Ain el Tineh, pulverizing an apartment building also home to an exotic plant shop right near the speaker of parliament’s residence and overlooking the city’s only public beach.
Further strikes blew up apartments near a well-known chocolate shop in the mixed commercial and residential area of Mar Elias, left smoldering ruins in the densely populated neighborhood of Basta near a school sheltering displaced people, wiped out part of a building that housed a snack shop and a hair salon in the Caracas district and destroyed the bottom floors of a multi-story building along Beirut’s coastal corniche, causing a partial collapse.
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