Beirut (Lebanon) (AFP) - Lebanon said an Israeli air strike in the heart of Beirut that brought down a residential building and jolted residents across the city killed at least 15 people on Saturday.

A Lebanese security source told AFP that the strike had “targeted a leading Hezbollah figure”, but a Hezbollah lawmaker denied any official of the Iran-backed group was present.

The attack in the capital was followed by others in the city’s southern suburbs after calls by the Israeli military to evacuate.

Israel has not commented on the strike in central Beirut.

Rescue operations were underway in the area on Saturday morning, with an excavator removing the rubble of the eight-storey building.

“The strike was so strong it felt like the building was about to fall on our heads,” said Samir, 60, who lives in a building facing the one that was destroyed.

He said he fled his home in the middle of the night with his wife and children.

“We saw two dead people on the ground… The children started crying and their mother cried even more,” he told AFP.

The Israeli strike, which hit the working-class Basta neighbourhood, killed at least 15 people and wounded 63, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

“The final death toll will be determined after DNA tests are carried out,” the ministry said in a statement.

The state-run National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli jets had launched six missiles at the structure, causing “widespread destruction in buildings” nearby.

The predawn attack in Basta was not preceded by an evacuation warning from Israel’s military.

- ‘Diplomatic resolution’ -

Similar strikes carried out without warning outside of Hezbollah’s traditional bastions have tended to target senior figures but Hezbollah lawmaker Amin Sherri denied any official was present at the time of the strike.

“There was no party figure in the two targeted buildings,” the NNA quoted him as saying as he visited the site.

The health ministry said the Israeli air force also hit eastern Lebanon, killing eight people in the town of Shmostar overlooking the Bekaa Valley, another Hezbollah stronghold.

“The Israeli enemy strike on Shmostar killed eight people, including four children, and nine others were injured, including four in critical condition,” a ministry statement said.

Israel stepped up its campaign against the militant group in late September, targeting its strongholds in Lebanon’s east and south as well as south Beirut, and later sending in ground troops after nearly a year of limited cross-border exchanges of fire.

Lebanon’s health ministry says more than 3,650 people have been killed since October 2023, when Hezbollah began trading fire with Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas. Most of the deaths have been since September this year.

In a telephone call with Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz on Saturday, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin “reiterated US commitment to a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon that allows Israeli and Lebanese civilians to return safely to their homes on both sides of the border”, a spokesperson said.

US envoy Amos Hochstein has been shuttling between Lebanon and Israel this week in a bid to broker a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war.

After talks in Beirut earlier this week, he had said that a deal was “within our grasp” but as he headed to Israel both sides put out statements that dented hopes of rapid progress.

- Deadly strikes on Gaza -

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

At least 44,176 people have been killed in Gaza during more than 13 months of war, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP on Saturday that 19 people were killed and more than 40 wounded by predawn Israeli air strikes and tank fire.

Umm Muhammad Abu Sabla, the sister of one of the victims of Saturday’s strikes, told AFP she rushed to the scene to find “people carrying body parts from under the rubble”.

“Our entire life is misery. Let them kill us all so we can be relieved from this suffering,” the 62-year-old said in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.

The war has created a humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory, where people are experiencing acute shortages of food, fuel and medicines.

In his call with Katz, the Pentagon chief “urged the government of Israel to continue to take steps to improve the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza”.

The United Nations and others have repeatedly decried humanitarian conditions, particularly in northern Gaza.

The UN says more than 100,000 have been displaced from the area since early October, and an official told the Security Council last week that people “are effectively starving”.

The trickle of aid entering Gaza was the principal basis cited by the International Criminal Court in the arrest warrants it announced on Thursday for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

The court said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the pair bore “criminal responsibility” for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity, including over “the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies”.