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Israel's military on Friday said it carried out a precise strike on the central headquarters of the Hezbollah terror organization in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, an airstrike that shook buildings and sent a huge plume of smoke above the city.
In a televised statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the precision strike targeted what its spokesperson called the epicenter of Hezbollah's terror, intentionally built under residential buildings in the heart of Dahiyeh.
Israeli sources said the U.S. had been notified ahead of time, moments before the airstrike, but Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday that the U.S. did not have advance warning of the strike. Singh said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to his Israeli counterpart only after the Israeli operation was underway.
Lebanese television carried footage of the strike's aftermath, with billowing smoke and the smoldering ruins of the building with rubble filling the streets around it.
IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari went on to say that after being targeted for nearly a year by Hezbollah rockets and drones, "Israel is doing what every sovereign state in the world would do if they had a terror organization that seeks their destruction on their border."
The Israeli airstrike came minutes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York, delivering much the same message. "We won't rest until our citizens can return safely to their homes," he said. "We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border."
Netanyahu also had a message for Iran, which sponsors both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. "If you strike us, we will strike you," he said. "There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that's true of the entire Middle East."
Prior to the airstrike on the Beirut suburb, Israel and Hezbollah had continued to exchange airstrikes across Lebanon's southern border. Earlier Friday, at a Beirut news conference, acting Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said airstrikes had continued overnight, killing 25 people and injuring a "large number" of others.
Hezbollah fired rockets into the northern Israeli city of Tiberias, saying it was responding to "savage" strikes on Lebanese towns and villages. First responders in the city reported three people suffered minor injuries.
Earlier Friday, at a Geneva news conference, U.N. humanitarian officials said the burgeoning conflict was having broader regional consequences.
The U.N. refugee agency's representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said more than 30,000 people had crossed the border from Lebanon into Syria in the last 72 hours because of the fighting. He said perhaps 75% to 80% of those people were Syrians returning home.
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon, Imran Riza, told reporters, "We are witnessing the deadliest period in Lebanon in a generation, and many expressed their fear that this is just the beginning."
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.