BARJA, Lebanon (Reuters) – Lebanese rescuers scoured the rubble of a destroyed apartment building south of Beirut on Wednesday for bodies or any survivors of an Israeli strike that health authorities said killed at least 20 people the previous evening.
The strike on Barja on Tuesday evening hit a multi-storey apartment building on a hilltop, shearing off segments of the floors and exposing inner walls and staircases.
Lebanon’s health ministry said just before midnight that the strike had killed 20 people and wounded 14, but said the toll could still rise.
Moussa Zahran, who lived on one of the upper floors of the building, returned on Wednesday morning to sift through the ruins of his home. His burned feet were wrapped in gauze and his son and wife were in hospital after being wounded in the strike.
“These rocks that you see here weigh 100 kilos, they fell on a 13 kilo kid,” he said, referring to his son and the apartment wall that had collapsed onto him during the strike.
It was not immediately clear if the strike was targeting a member of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which has been locked in more than a year of fighting with Israel’s military. There was no evacuation warning ahead of the air raid.
More than 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon over the last year, the vast majority of them in the past six weeks, as Israel ramped up its air campaign across the country. The Barja attack was among the deadliest single strikes.
(Reporting by Aziz Taher and Hassan Hankir in Barja; Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily; Writing by Maya Gebeily; Editing by Ros Russell)
