An Israeli airstrike that hit an apartment building in a village south of Beirut killed at least 15 people, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Tuesday.
The ministry said the toll is not final and operations to rescue people from under the rubble are ongoing.
Lebanon’s state news agency said the airstrike hit an area known as Barja just north of the port city of Sidon. It was not immediately clear what the target of the airstrike was.
Earlier on Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike killed one person and wounded 20 others in the nearby town of Jiyeh.
Both attacks hit areas that have not been a regular target of Israeli military operations and had not received prior evacuation warnings.
"It felt like it was inside the house," Malika Al Hajj, an elderly woman living in Jiyeh, told The Associated Press. "I ran away — I don’t even know which neighbor brought me out, because everything was black. You couldn’t see anything."
Once outside, Hajj said she discovered that the strike had hit the nearby building where her nephews live.
"Men, women and children" live inside, she said. "I just want to be reassured. I saw some of them, but the others, they told me, were taken to the hospital."
At the site of the strike, the building’s skeletal frame stands amid the rubble, its concrete shattered, windows blown out and metal twisted from the impact.
Families were seen leaving the area, carrying what belongings they could gather.
Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 3,013 people and injured 13,553 others since Oct. 2023, the Lebanese government said on Tuesday.
