At least nine people were killed in Israeli strikes south of Beirut in the early hours of Wednesday, while attacks also continued in southern Lebanon and parts of the country's east.
Lebanon's health ministry said an Israeli raid in Jnah, a mainly residential area with many diplomatic missions, killed at least seven people and wounded 26 others. An earlier toll said five people were killed in that strike.
Four cars parked on the street were targeted, and footage showed the late-night inferno which firefighters battled to extinguish.
The sound of several large explosions had been heard across the city, and a column of smoke was seen rising from the area. The state-run National News Agency (NNA) said the strike had originated from a warship.
Scenes the morning after showed debris across the blackened street with remains of the vehicles.
A separate strike late on Tuesday hit a vehicle in Khaldeh , further south of Beirut, killing two people and wounding three others.
The NNA also said Israeli artillery and airstrikes hit Lebanon's south and the adjacent Western Beqaa district.
The Israeli military had claimed it struck a "senior Hezbollah commander" and another member of the Lebanese group in two separate strikes "in the Beirut area", without naming the targets or exact locations.
Later on Wednesday, the military released a statement announcing it had killed Ali Youssef Hashem, commander of the southern front in Hezbollah.
Hezbollah early on Wednesday claimed cross-border attacks against Israel and said its fighters were engaged in "fierce clashes" with soldiers in the Lebanese town of Shamaa, around five kilometres (three miles) from the border, and claimed rocket fire targeting a group of Israeli soldiers in another area.
Around midnight (2100 GMT Tuesday), air raid sirens had sounded across northern Israel's Galilee region, according to the military's Home Front Command, hours after what Israeli media said was a barrage of more than 40 rockets fired by Hezbollah, which also claimed multiple attacks on northern Israel late Tuesday.
Israel's military has reported several casualties among its ranks in recent days in southern Lebanon, with Israeli media reports suggesting at least 10 killed between 7 and 30 March. Renewed occupation Cross-border clashes between Hezbollah and Israel escalated into a full-blown 66-day war in September 2024, before shifting into near-daily one-sided Israeli attacks across Lebanon following a US-brokered ceasefire in November 2024.
Despite repeated Israeli violations of the truce, which included airstrikes and the occupation of several border hilltops, Hezbollah refrained from responding for 15 months before launching a rocket attack on Israel on 2 March after the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in US-Israeli strikes on Tehran on 28 February.
More than 1,260 people have been killed in Lebanon since fighting resumed a month ago, as Israeli forces attempt to push deeper into southern Lebanon towards the Litani River but face sustained resistance and difficulties consolidating or holding territory. More than a million people have been displaced from Shia-majority southern Lebanon and Beirut's southern suburbs, as well as areas in the eastern Beqaa region.
Israel has said it intends to invade the entire area south of the Litani River – about eight percent of Lebanon and home to around 200,000 people – to allegedly create a "buffer zone" in a bid to push Hezbollah away from the border and secure northern Israel from the group's attacks.
Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday that "all the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished". Dozens of frontier towns and villages have already been flattened since the last war in 2024 as part of Israel's There are fears that Lebanese displaced from the south will be unable to return and Tel Aviv will seek a permanent occupation under the guise of a security belt. Israel had occupied that same region since the 1980s until 2000.