UN urges de-escalation as Beirut attack toll rises to 31

Lebanon’s health minister said Saturday that the death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb on Friday has risen to 31, including seven women and three children.

Firass Abiad told reporters that 68 people were also wounded of whom 15 remain in hospital, in the deadliest Israeli airstrike on Beirut since the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

The death toll included Ibrahim Akil, a Hezbollah commander who was in charge of the group’s elite Radwan Forces, as well as about a dozen members of the militant group who were meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed.

Israel launched the rare airstrike in the densely populated southern Beirut neighborhood on Friday afternoon during rush hour as people returned home from work and students from schools. On Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene of the airstrike where workers were still digging through the rubble.

Lebanese troops cordoned off the area preventing people from reaching the building that was knocked down as members of the Lebanese Red Cross stood nearby to take any recovered body from under the rubble.

Friday’s deadly strike came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, largely targeting Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets.