Israeli strike rocks Beirut suburbs

An Israeli strike hit Beirut's southern suburbs early on Wednesday morning, Reuters witnesses said, hours after the US said it opposed the scope of Israeli attacks in the city amid a rising death toll and fears of wider escalation involving Iran.

Reuters witnesses heard a blast and saw a plume of smoke. It came after an evacuation order by the Israeli military for a building in the area.

Israeli military evacuation orders were also affecting more than a quarter of Lebanon, according to the UN refugee agency, two weeks after Israel began incursions into the south of the country that it says are aimed at pushing back Hizbollah.

Lebanon's caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati had said on Tuesday his contacts with US officials had produced a "kind of guarantee” that Israel would tamp down strikes on Beirut and its southern suburbs.

The last time Beirut was hit was on Oct. 10, when two strikes near the city centre killed 22 people and brought down entire buildings in a densely populated neighbourhood.

Rescuers and responders work at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted Toul, Lebanon, on Tuesday. AFP

Lebanese security sources said at the time that Hizbollah official Wafiq Safa was the target but that he had survived. There was no comment from Israel.

Some Western countries have been pushing for a ceasefire between the two neighbours, as well as in Gaza, though the United States says it continues to support Israel and was sending an anti-missile system and troops.

On Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had expressed its concerns to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's administration on the recent strikes.

"When it comes to the scope and nature of the bombing campaign that we saw in Beirut over the past few weeks, it's something that we made clear to the government of Israel we had concerns with and we were opposed to," he told reporters, adopting a harsher tone than Washington has taken so far.

Israel has been turning up the heat on Hizbollah since it began incursions into Lebanon after killing Hizbollah leaders and commanders, including its veteran secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah last month in the biggest blow to the group in decades.

Reuters