BEIRUT — At least 40 people were killed in Israeli strikes in eastern Lebanon on Wednesday, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

An Israeli official said the strikes, in the governorates of Baalbek and Bekaa, targeted operatives of the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah.

Lebanon's culture minister said one of the strikes also seriously damaged an Ottoman-era building in the vicinity of the Roman ruins in the city of Baalbek, which is a Unesco World Heritage site.

Israeli strikes also hit southern Beirut on Wednesday, after the IDF issued evacuation warnings. The military said it struck Hezbollah command centers, weapons stores and other infrastructure.

A later IDF warning covered four neighborhoods in southern Beirut including an area near Lebanon's international airport, which has continued to operate despite Israel's air strikes on the capital city.

Soon after, pictures showed a large fireball and thick black smoke rising into the night sky above Beirut.

Meanwhile, a rocket fired by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon killed an Israeli man near a kibbutz in northern Israel, paramedics said.

Lebanon's Civil defense agency has also said the bodies of 30 people were recovered from a four-storey apartment building hit by an Israeli strike on Tuesday evening that destroyed one side of the building and sparked a fire.

The building, in Barja, a predominantly Sunni Muslim coastal town south of Beirut, was reportedly housing displaced people.

The Israeli military said it had struck "terror infrastructure” belonging to Hezbollah.

A man who lived on one of the upper floors of the apartment building that was hit said his son and wife were injured by falling masonry.

"These rocks that you see here weigh 100kg, they fell on a 13kg kid," Moussa Zahran told Reuters news agency as he surveyed the damage.

“I removed [the rocks] and... handed my son to the civil defense through the window. I carried my wife and came downstairs and got out behind the building... I thank God, glory be to Him, for this miracle.”

An Irish Times correspondent cited a member of the civil defense at the scene as saying that those killed whose bodies were found complete included seven women and three children — a seven-month-old baby and two girls aged seven and 12.

Neighbors also said the building was housing displaced people who had fled from other areas, she added.

There was no evacuation warning ahead of the strike, according to Reuters.

The Lebanese health ministry gave a preliminary death toll of 20 from the strike on Barja late on Tuesday but did not provide an updated figure on Wednesday.

On Wednesday evening, the ministry said 40 people had been killed and 53 others injured in a series of Israeli strikes in Bekaa and Baalbek governorates, which make up most of the eastern Bekaa Valley. They included 16 people killed in the village of Nasriyah and 11 in Baalbek city, it added.

Lebanese Culture Minister Mohammad Mortada also told the director-general of Unesco that one of the strikes had "caused serious damage to the ancient Manshiya building" in Baalbek city, which he said dated back to the Ottoman period and was located in the vicinity of the ruins of several Roman temples.

"The destruction of this exceptional monument next to a Unesco World Heritage site is an irremediable loss for Lebanon and for world heritage," he warned.

An AFP news agency correspondent also reported that the famous 19th Century Palmyra Hotel near the Roman ruins was damaged by nearby strikes, which the health ministry said killed two people.

An Israeli military official said its aircraft had carried out strikes based on precise intelligence indicating the presence of Hezbollah operatives in the Baalbek area.

The military also said it had killed the commander of Hezbollah’s forces in the southern border region of Khiam, and that a number of other Hezbollah fighters had been killed by air strikes and by troops operating inside southern Lebanon over the past day.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s new secretary general, Naim Qassem, said in a speech that the group had “tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants” ready to fight and that nowhere in Israel was “beyond the reach of our drones and missiles”.

"I will tell you very clearly, our conviction is that only one thing can stop this war of aggression, and that is the battlefield," he declared, adding that he did not believe "political action" would end the conflict.

The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired about 170 rockets into northern and central Israel on Wednesday.

In the evening, the Magen David Adom ambulance service said a man was killed by a rocket near the kibbutz of Kfar Masaryk, which is south of the coastal town of Acre.

Paramedics said the man was found in a field with severe shrapnel wounds and that he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Later, Israeli media identified him as Sivan Sade, an 18-year-old resident of Kfar Masaryk who had been working in the field.

Also on Wednesday, Israeli media said one rocket hit a car park near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, but the Israel Airport Authority said its operations were not affected. Hezbollah said it targeted the Tzrifin military base near the airport.

A large section of a rocket also hit a parked car in the town of Raanana, just north of Tel Aviv.

Since the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah six weeks ago, at least 2,400 people have been killed and more than 1.2 million displaced across Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli air strikes have eliminated most of the group’s leadership, including Qassem’s predecessor Hassan Nasrallah, and caused widespread destruction in parts of southern and eastern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs — areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

It says it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of northern Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks, which Hezbollah launched in support of Palestinians the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Israeli authorities say more than 70 people have been killed by Hezbollah attacks in Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the past year. — BBC