Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.

During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometres away.

It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.

On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.

“Last night was the most violent of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.

Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation in the area of Beirut”.

Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.

For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on September 27.

A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.

Israel shooting

A woman was killed in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba on Sunday, Israeli media outlets reported after police said that several people had been injured in a suspected shooting there. The attacker had been killed, the ambulance service said.

Syria strike

An Israeli airstrike targeted three cars carrying medical and relief materials in the
industrial city in Syria’s Homs, the Syrian state news agency reported on Sunday, adding that material damage was reported.