“Something pulled me hard, and then the explosion happened,” said Moussa Zahran, who was at home with his wife and son when the building was hit. He said he could not see but began digging through the rubble until he found his wife and son – alive but injured – and pulled them out. Both are still in the hospital, he said.
Another resident of the building, Muhyiddin Al-Qalaaji, said he was at work when the strike happened and heard the news from his wife, who called him frantically.
“There are many dead and injured,” he said as he carried out what he could salvage of the family’s belongings on Wednesday morning.
Civil defense official Mostafa Danaj said some of the neighbors have reported that there are still people missing.
Israeli forces and the militant group Hezbollah have been clashing for more than a year, since Hezbollah began firing rockets across the border shortly after the October 7, 2023 Palestinian Hamas attack from Gaza into southern Israel sparked the ongoing war there.
The war on the Lebanese front has escalated significantly since mid-September, when Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment and ground invasion.
On Wednesday, sirens rang out across northern and central Israel, including in the populous Tel Aviv metropolitan area, as Hezbollah fired ten rockets. There were no reports of injuries.
A large part of a rocket smashed into a parked car in the central Israeli city of Raanana. Rockets also hit an open area near Israel’s main airport, Israeli media reported, although the airport said flights were operating as normal.
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in a surprise announcement that sparked protests across the country. Gallant’s replacement is Foreign Minister Israel Katz, a longtime Netanyahu loyalist and veteran minister.
Israeli police said they arrested 40 people during protests on Tuesday night when demonstrators blocked Israel’s main road in Tel Aviv. Another night of protests over Gallant’s firing was planned across Israel on Wednesday night.
Netanyahu and Gallant have repeatedly disagreed over the war in Gaza but the prime minister had avoided letting go of his rival ahead of Tuesday’s US presidential election, in which former President Donald Trump scored a comeback victory.
Gallant had pushed back on some of Netanyahu’s demands during indirect negotiations with Hamas on a ceasefire and hostage release, and was seen as more open to reaching at least a temporary truce.
The Hamas attack that triggered the war killed around 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and Palestinian militants abducted 250 others that day. About 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 43,000 people, Palestinian health officials say. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but say more than half of those killed were women and children.
Since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah broke out in 2023, at least 3,000 people have been killed and about 13,500 injured in Lebanon, about a quarter of them women and children, the health ministry reported.
Hezbollah continues to send dozens of rockets and drones at Israel. The projectiles have so far killed 72 people in Israel, including 30 soldiers, according to Netanyahu’s office.
