(Beirut) It all started with huge, almost simultaneous explosions. Then ambulance sirens went off across the city. Thursday evening, the heart of Beirut experienced its deadliest Israeli strikes, after nearly three weeks of trembling to the rhythm of bombings on its southern suburbs.
In the popular neighborhood of Basta, very densely populated, the three or four floors of two old buildings collapsed like houses of cards, new targets in the war now open between Israel and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement.
At the site of the other strike, in the al-Noueiri district, a brand new eight-story building was targeted.
At the same time, Hassan Jaber was taking out the trash from his apartment.
“I just opened the elevator door and I was injured in my arm and leg,” he told AFP, still stunned by the explosion. “I fell and saw that everyone was fleeing.”
Ayman, who lives opposite and refuses to give his last name, says he “heard three explosions”.
“The kitchen windows exploded because we are on the other side of the street and my son started crying,” he continues.
Around, firefighters are working to put out the fire which is engulfing a residential building. They deployed their large scale to evacuate the inhabitants.
Amid the rubble and crushed cars, armed with huge flashlights, rescuers in yellow or red vests are busy, shovels in hand, wading through the mud created by burst pipes.
“The earth was shaking”
“Be careful, there is a hole there,” says a member of the Civil Defense.
Construction machines are trying to clear the ground while nearby, injured people are lying on the side of the road. Neighbors leave in a hurry, a few belongings hastily thrown into a bag under their arm.
Around the buildings which bear the scars of the explosion – gutted floors and dilapidated balconies – men from Hezbollah and Lebanese soldiers maintain a tight security cordon in this mixed neighborhood where Muslims, Shiites and Sunnis live.
Less than a kilometer from the crater, a Beirutian tells the story. “Usually I’m not afraid. But there, it was as if the earth was shaking.”
Five minutes away, in the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh, families are still shaking after hearing the huge explosions, as if they were very close, residents say.
From their windows, residents watch columns of black smoke rise above the capital.
For a year, Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged cross-border fire in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. On September 23, their war spread to the east of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Since then, more than 1,200 people have been killed and more than a million forced from their homes across the country.
No warning
And above all, the six million inhabitants of Lebanon live to the rhythm of Israeli evacuation orders.
But this evening in Basta and Noueiri, nothing had been announced. No more than on September 27, when massive bombings killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the southern suburbs.
This evening, the Israeli army even posted on its social networks a call to evacuate another neighborhood an hour later, in the southern suburbs where bombings are now daily.
In the capital, this is the third time that the Israeli air force has struck since September 23.
A raid in October targeted Hezbollah emergency services, killing seven rescue workers, and another in September killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left-wing Palestinian movement which, like all groups, owns Palestinians, an armed wing.
Thursday evening, a Lebanese security source assured that a senior Hezbollah official was targeted, without being able to name him.
No one has yet announced who it could be, but the Ministry of Health is compiling the identities of the victims who were pulled from the rubble.
For the moment, 22 dead and 117 injured.
The pro-Iranian party has already announced that it is canceling a press conference it was planning for Friday. “In view of current developments”.