At least 41 killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon: health ministry

At least 41 people were killed in Israeli strikes across Lebanon on Sunday, including 23 in a raid north of the capital Beirut, the health ministry said.

Israel, at war with Lebanon's Hezbollah since late September, has intensified its air campaign against the Iran-backed movement in recent days, especially in the country's south and the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Further north, an "Israeli enemy strike on Almat in the Jbeil district killed 23 people including seven children," the health ministry said in a statement, adding that body parts had been recovered from the site and were being identified.

The Shiite Muslim-majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometres (19 miles) from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region -- outside Hezbollah's traditional strongholds.

The strike hit a house shortly after a Hezbollah member arrived there for a visit, a security source told AFP, adding that he was injured and later died in hospital.

AFPTV footage showed rescuers rummaging with their bare hands through the wreckage of a house that had been completely razed, pulling out bodies wrapped in blankets while an excavator moved the rubble.

A pile of broken concrete and the twisted metal structure that made up the roof lay at the bottom of a staircase leading to the destroyed house.

Hezbollah lawmaker Raed Berro, one of the members of parliament representing the Jbeil district, at the scene denied Israeli claims that Hezbollah members or weapons were embedded among civilians.

"Important military and security figures are usually on the frontlines... not at the rear," he told AFP.

"Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women," he said.

Facebook user Ali Haydar posted a picture of the home, which he said belonged to his family, before it was destroyed.

He added that people displaced from the eastern Baalbek region, also a focus of Israeli strikes, had sought refuge there.

"There were 35 relatives of ours from Baalbek in the house" including women and children, he said.

"Most of them have been martyred" in the strike, Haydar added.

- Fleeing -

The area was cordoned off by Lebanese security forces and Hezbollah members in civilian clothing, an AFP correspondent at the scene saw.

Dozens of people packed their belongings in their cars and fled the village, the correspondent said.

The health ministry also said Israeli strikes on Sunday killed three Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers in south Lebanon, and at least 12 people in the Baalbek region.

Another three people died in a strike on Al-Qasr in the Hermel region in the east, the ministry said.

Earlier, Lebanese official media reported an Israeli strike on a house in the main eastern city of Baalbek, which was not preceded by an Israeli army evacuation warning.

"Enemy aircraft launched a strike on a house in the Al-Laqees neighbourhood" of the city, the state-run National News Agency said.

Israel intensified its air campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah bastions in Lebanon on September 23 and a week later sent in ground troops.

The escalation came after nearly a year of low-intensity, cross-border attacks by Hezbollah in support of its ally Hamas following the Palestinian Islamists' October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.

More than 3,130 people have been killed in Lebanon since the cross-border exchanges began, according to Lebanon's health ministry, most of them since September 23.