Smoke rose over the southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday after Israel launched its first strike on the Lebanese capital in three weeks, hitting a residential apartment building in the Shuwayfat area near the city’s international airport and killing at least three people, including a woman and her infant daughter, as well as a child of Syrian nationality. 

Fifteen others were wounded in the attack, among them three children and five women, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The Israeli military confirmed it had conducted what it described as a precise strike in Beirut but declined to identify the target, while two Israeli security sources told media that the strike was an assassination attempt targeting Ali al-Husseini, described as the head of the missile division within the Imam Hussein Division, a militia aligned with Hezbollah and Iran.

There was no immediate response from Hezbollah or Iran.

The Beirut strike was part of a significantly wider Israeli assault on Lebanon on Thursday that killed at least 16 people and wounded 58 others across the south of the country, making it one of the deadliest days since a Washington-brokered ceasefire agreement came into effect on April 17.

Israeli fighter jets and drones pounded residential areas, roads, and civilian infrastructure across southern Lebanon, with evacuation warnings issued for eight buildings in the coastal city of Tyre and surrounding neighbourhoods. In the city of Sidon, a drone struck an apartment building housing displaced families, killing five people including five children among the 21 wounded. On the Adloun Highway linking Sidon and Tyre, an Israeli drone struck a fleeing car and killed six members of the same family, four of them children and their parents.

A separate drone strike without warning killed two people on a motorcycle near Tyre, while a Lebanese army soldier was killed in a drone attack in the Nabatiyeh area while riding his motorcycle.

The timing of the assault drew immediate attention, coming just one day before scheduled talks at the Pentagon in Washington between Israeli and Lebanese military delegations aimed at consolidating the April 17 ceasefire and working out broader security arrangements. The United States had reportedly been pressing Israel to refrain from striking Beirut specifically, amid concerns that such attacks could destabilise the peace process and derail negotiations between Tel Aviv and the Lebanese government. Thursday’s resumption of strikes on the capital, the first since May 6 when Israel killed a senior Hezbollah Radwan Forces official, has raised fresh doubts about whether the fragile ceasefire can survive the mounting pressure from both sides. Israeli troops have in recent days crossed the Litani River in southern Lebanon and issued sweeping displacement orders across large sections of the south, including Tyre and its surrounding areas.

Tensions have been building for days as Israel widened its operations in Lebanon, with the Lebanese president vowing to do everything in his power to bring the conflict to an end. The Lebanese army, which has come under increasing pressure from Israeli strikes on its personnel, confirmed the death of at least one soldier in Thursday’s attacks. Hezbollah, which opened a second front against Israel when the broader regional conflict erupted in early March, has continued to launch drone attacks into northern Israel, with the Israeli military confirming on Thursday that a soldier in northern Israel was killed in a Hezbollah drone strike and two reservists were wounded.

The resumption of bombing in Beirut, with white smoke rising above residential neighbourhoods visible from across the city, underscored how precarious the ceasefire has become and how far Lebanon remains from the stability that the April agreement was intended to provide. With Washington talks set for Friday, the question hanging over both the Lebanese capital and the negotiating table is whether either side is genuinely prepared to step back from the edge.