Deadliest Israeli strike yet on central Beirut leaves gruesome scenes

Stepping through the charred ruins of her neighbourhood in central Beirut, Lebanese seamstress Laila Amayrad watched bulldozers pick through a building flattened by an Israeli strike days ago, hoping her friends' bodies would be found.

The massive Israeli strike hit the densely populated Basta Fawqa neighbourhood in the Lebanese capital just before dawn on Saturday, killing at least 29 people including children, making it the deadliest bombardment of the city in the last year.

On Monday afternoon, more than 48 hours later, civil defence workers were still digging through the remains of the eight-storey building, now reduced to a vast crater.

Amayrad, a freckled woman in a red headscarf, had lived in the neighbourhood nearly her whole life. With tears in her eyes, she counted nine of the dead as friends, neighbours or clients, some of whom had been hosting relatives displaced by Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon.

"They came here to be safe, because this neighbourhood is safe. I would walk around alone at midnight because there are no weapons, no fighters, nothing here," Amayrad told Reuters.

"And they were killed just sleeping at home, with no warning. It's the innocents who are losing their lives in this."

Israeli authorities have not commented on the strike. Israel says it is targeting Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and that it issues evacuation warnings to civilians to minimise risks to them ahead of bombardment. It did not issue an evacuation warning ahead of the Basta Fawqa strike.

Amayrad joked that it would be safer to live in Beirut's southern suburbs - once a densely populated neighbourhood and stronghold of Hezbollah - than in Basta.

"At least Israel issues warnings there," she said.

A Lebanese security source said preliminary assessments showed the Nov. 23 strike on Basta Fawqa used a bunker-busting bomb. Amayrad and another resident, Sherif Itani, who knew the building since their childhoods, said it contained no bunker.

Another multi-storey home two buildings over had been hit on Oct. 10, also without warning. Two separate strikes that evening on central Beirut killed at least 22 people, making it the deadliest strike before Basta was hit again.

On Monday afternoon, a rescue worker caked in dust made his way from the bulldozers down a mountain of rubble and plopped down on a plastic chair to light a cigarette, saying he doubted anyone else would be found alive.

Rescuers said the strike was the most gruesome in more than a year of Israeli strikes on Lebanon, which escalated sharply since September. Israeli strikes have killed more than 3,750 people over the last year, Lebanon's health ministry said.

The head of the rescue unit at the scene, Hassan Yassin, told Reuters a head with no body was found on Saturday.

"We picked up a leg here, a hand here. We took out the bodies of three children yesterday. We found a dead older couple, both of them in wheelchairs," said Jaafar, an 18-year-old rescuer. "It was the worst scene yet."