TEL AVIV, Israel — An Israeli airstrike killed the chief spokesman for Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group on Sunday in the first attack in central Beirut in more than a month, while Palestinian medical officials said earlier Israeli strikes killed 12 in Gaza.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mohammed Afif was killed in the Beirut strike. He had been especially visible since Israel escalated its attacks in Lebanon in September. The action followed the assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was also killed in an Israeli airstrike.
People could be seen fleeing the neighborhood after the strike, which came without warning. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. The military also renewed calls on Sunday for residents in more than a dozen villages in southern Lebanon to flee as ground troops pushed farther north.
The strike that killed Afif hit a building in central Beirut belonging to the Arab socialist Baath party. An Associated Press photographer at the scene saw four bodies and four wounded people.
Ahead of the attack that killed Afif, Israeli warplanes had bombarded the southern suburbs of Beirut after the military warned people to evacuate from several buildings. Hezbollah has a strong presence in the area, known as the Dahiyeh, and the strikes came as Lebanese officials are considering a U.S.-brokered cease-fire proposal.
The Israeli military posted evacuation warnings on X about an hour before the strikes. Local media reported church bells ringing in and around the area to alert residents. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is continuing to fire dozens of projectiles into Israel each day and has expanded its range to the central part of the country. A rocket barrage on the northern city of Haifa on Saturday damaged a synagogue and wounded two civilians.
Lebanon’s health ministry says that more than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon during the fighting with Israel and more than 1.2 million driven from their homes. It is not known how many of the dead are Hezbollah fighters.
On the Israeli side, Hezbollah’s aerial attacks have killed at least 76 people, including 31 soldiers, and forced about 60,000 people to flee from communities in the north.
As fighting in the Middle East raged on, Israeli police said they arrested three suspects after two flares were fired at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in the coastal city of Caesarea.
Netanyahu and his family were not at the residence when the flares were fired at it overnight, and there were no injuries, authorities said. A drone launched by Hezbollah struck the residence last month, also when Netanyahu and his family were away.
The police did not provide details about the suspects behind the flares, but officials blamed domestic political critics of Netanyahu. Israel’s largely ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, condemned the incident and warned against “an escalation of the violence in the public sphere.”
For months, mass protests have assailed Netanyahu’s handling of the ongoing hostage crisis in Gaza. U.S. designated terror group Hamas is believed to be holding about 100 people captured from its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, although about 35 are believed to be dead.
Israelis rallied again in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to demand a cease-fire deal to return the hostages.
The Hamas terror attack more than 13 months ago killed about 1,200 people. Israel’s counteroffensive has killed nearly 44,000 Palestinians, with women and children more than half the verified total, according to the Gaza health ministry. The Israeli military says that thousands of Hamas militants are included in the death toll.
In the Gaza strikes on Sunday, Israel killed six people in Nuseirat and another four in Bureij, two built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
Another two people were killed in a strike on Gaza’s main north-south highway, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah, which received all 12 bodies.
Some material in this report came from The Associated Press.
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