Israel resumes airstrikes on southern Beirut

An Israeli strike hit Beirut's southern suburbs early on Wednesday morning, 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.

Israel’s military issued a warning earlier that an attack on the Dahiyeh suburb was imminent and told residents to flee from a designated building highlighted in red on an aerial map of the Haret Hreik neighbourhood. 

Israel said it hit an underground weapons depot belonging to Hezbollah. 

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 Hezbollah.

Israeli airstrikes killed at least ten people and injured 15 others in the southern town of Qana on Tuesday. It also intensified its bombing campaign in eastern Lebanon's Beqaa valley, with multiple air raids reported near Baalbek city on Tuesday. 

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 October 10, when two strikes near the city centre killed 22 people and brought down entire buildings in a densely populated neighbourhood.

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

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.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu told President Emmanuel Macron of France during a phone conversation that he opposed a unilateral ceasefire and said he was "taken aback" by Macron's plan to hold a conference on Lebanon, according to an Israeli readout.