dpa
Beirut
The death toll has risen to at least 30 a day after an Israeli air strike hit the coastal city of Barja in Lebanon.
Rescue workers also discovered body parts in the wreckage, the civil defence said. Three injured people were taken to hospital. Barja is located around 30 kilometres south of the capital Beirut.
Rescuers also pulled dead and injured people out of the wreckage in other places that were attacked by Israel, which was targetting the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, according to the Israeli military.
At least 15 bodies have been recovered in the Tyre region, the state news agency NNA reported. Lebanese media also reported renewed attacks in the Beeka plain in the east and in the border area with Israel in the south, both Hezbollah strongholds.
Among them was a Hezbollah official who was in an apartment. The building collapsed.
Lebanese security sources said the Hezbollah official who was killed had been in charge of distributing money to followers of the movement who have been displaced by the fighting.
Earlier, an Israeli airstrike targeted an apartment in the Jiyeh coastal area, 23 kilometres south of Beirut, killing one person and wounding 20 others, the Lebanese Health Ministry said in a preliminary report. The state-run National News Agency NNA said, "an Israeli air raid targeted a residential apartment in a building in the town of Jiyeh,” where eyewitnesses said a large plume of grey smoke was covering the area.
Pictures on social media showed a building with an apartment that was totally destroyed. Local media reports said the dead person was a Hezbollah member.
This is the second Israeli airstrike to target Jiyeh since Israel started carrying out massive strikes and ground attacks against Hezbollah posts and their residential areas in September.
Dozens of towns and villages in Lebanon have suffered severe levels of destruction as part of Israel’s offensive against the Hezbollah militia, the state-run Lebanese news agency NNA reported on Tuesday, citing its own sources.
NNA reported that entire streets or neighbourhoods in 37 towns have been obliterated. The report stated that 40,000 houses and apartments have been destroyed, with the southern region of the country being particularly affected.
At least 29 villages have been "completely destroyed” by Israel, in a 120-kilometre strip across the south of the country from the Naqoura region in the west to Shebaa in the Hasbaya district in the east, Mohamed Chamseddine, research director at the Lebanese polling institute Information International, said in an interview with the Saudi newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.
The Israeli military emphasizes that it only targets buildings used by Hezbollah, the Shiite militia allied with Iran, as hideouts or weapons depots.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war last year, Hezbollah has regularly fired rockets from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to leave their homes. Following almost a year of cross-border exchanges, Israel ramped up its campaign against Hezbollah to facilitate the evacuees’ return, launching a ground offensive in Lebanon in October and intensifying its airstrikes across the country.
The conflict has had a devastating impact on the humanitarian situation in Lebanon. In total, some 1.4 million of the nation’s 6 million people have been affected by the fighting, according to the World Food Programme.