The moment 900kg bomb hits a Beirut building

A month after Israel escalated its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, airstrikes continued to hit Beirut on Tuesday, including one 900kg bomb caught on camera destroying an apartment building.

A burst of images showed the descent of the bomb before it slammed into the multistorey block in the city’s Ghobeiri neighbourhood, quickly reducing it to rubble. There was no immediate confirmation of casualties from the destroyed building, which the Israelis said housed “Hezbollah facilities”.

It also came less than a day after another deadly air strike targeted a block in the same area, which is close to the country’s largest public hospital.

With the bomb crater still smoking from the airstrike the night before, on Tuesday rescue workers had to shout over the noise of excavators and men with sledgehammers trying to clear chunks of concrete and debris.

Lebanese Civil Defence Rescue workers suddenly found a hole in the cleared wreckage and shoved their heads in, like foxes at a warren. They told everyone to be quiet. A young man phoned his missing friend. He cried after hearing a phone ringing beneath the rubble.

Across the crater Juma, a local resident, hollered to his friend Ali to check again on their neighbours as the search for survivors continued. “So many people live here,” he said. “Lebanese, Syrians, Sudanese. The Sudanese man’s home came down on top of him.”

At least 18 people were killed – including four children – and dozens more injured in Monday night’s blast according to an updated death toll on Tuesday released by the Lebanese Ministry of Health. Of the wounded, seven were in a critical condition at the nearby Rafik Hariri University Hospital, which had its glass entrance hall shattered by the blast. In the vicinity, four buildings were flattened by the strikes.

Israel’s military denied targeting the hospital, but also repeated its argument that Hezbollah was hiding fighters, weapons and money in densely packed residential areas. “The IDF will continue to operate in accordance with international law against the Hezbollah terrorist organisation, which systematically embeds its terrorist assets into the civilian population,” the Israeli Defence Forces said.

The strike, which the IDF said struck a “Hezbollah target”, took place about 10.30pm local time on Monday – only 20 minutes after the Israeli military’s Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, warned local residents to leave with evacuation orders posted on X and Telegram.

The area around the hospital, close to the main road to Beirut’s airport, was not mentioned in the evacuation order, Maan Khalil, the mayor of Ghobeiri, said. “Most of the people, they were children and they were sleeping at around 10.30pm,” he said before adding: “And that’s what led now to a lot of missing children under their houses.”

Some of the residents had already fled from southern Lebanon in an effort to escape Israel’s military campaign. Around the site of the attack, they were on the move again.

At another medical centre, just under a kilometre away from the Ghobeiri blast, the IDF alleged that Hezbollah was hoarding millions of dollars worth of gold and cash in a former bunker used by the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike late last month.

“Where is the bunker located? Directly under al-Sahel Hospital in the heart of Beirut,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, told a press conference on Monday. The IDF released a video animation detailing an underground complex with several rooms and sleeping quarters, accessed by a lift.

On Tuesday morning, the hospital staff rejected the claims, and offered the world’s media free access to the building to investigate however they wished.

Standing alone in an operation room in the basement, Halimah El Annan, 56, head of nursing and auditing, said the Israeli claims were absurd. On the floor below there were only morgues, generators and oxygen tanks, she said.

“There is nothing here. No Hassan Nasrallah,” she laughed.

“If Hezbollah was hiding stuff, they would give money to the hospital to store it but my basic salary is $US400 [a month]. There is not enough money for medicine.”