Beirut: Israeli airstrikes hit central Beirut on Thursday evening, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens, Lebanon's health ministry said. The attack left two neighbourhoods smouldering and further escalated Israel's bloody conflict with Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

A senior Hezbollah official eluded the Israeli assassination attempt on Thursday in Beirut, three security sources said. Wafiq Safa, who heads Hezbollah's liaison and coordination unit responsible for working with Lebanese security agencies, was targeted by Israel on Thursday night but survived, Reuters reported.

Israel did not issue evacuation warnings ahead of the strikes on Thursday, which were the deadliest attack on central Beirut since the beginning of the hostilities. After Israel killed a series of high-ranking Hezbollah officials in recent weeks, including top leader Hassan Nasrallah, Safa was among the few surviving senior figures as the group's upper echelons struggled to reorganise. The attempt to kill Safa, whose role merges security and political affairs, marked a widening of Israel's targets among Hezbollah officials, which previously focused on the group’s military commanders and top leaders.

The strikes apparently targeted two residential buildings in separate neighbourhoods of western Beirut, according to an AP photographer at the scene, bringing down one multi-story building and wiping out the lower floors of another. The Israeli military said it was looking into the reported strikes on the Lebanese capital. Israeli airstrikes have been far more common in Beirut's tightly packed southern suburbs, where Hezbollah bases many of its operations.

Thursday's strikes followed a year of tit-for-tat exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel that boiled over into all-out war in recent weeks, with Israel carrying out waves of heavy strikes across Lebanon and launching a ground invasion. Hezbollah has expanded its rocket fire to more populated areas deeper inside Israel, causing few casualties but disrupting daily life.

The attack came the same day as Israeli forces fired on United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon and wounded two of them. The attack drew widespread condemnation and prompted the Italian Defence Ministry to summon Israel's ambassador in protest.

Before the latest Beirut strikes, Lebanon's crisis response unit said Israeli attacks over the past day had killed 28 people, bringing the total to 2,169 killed in Lebanon since the war erupted last October. Hezbollah attacks have killed 28 civilians in northern Israel since the war began, as well as 39 Israeli soldiers, including both in northern Israel since last October and in southern Lebanon since Israel's ground invasion that has displaced 1.2 million people in Lebanon.

Attack on Gaza school
Even as attention has shifted to Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and rising tensions with Iran, Israel has continued to strike at what it says are Palestinian militant targets across the Gaza Strip.

Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in central Gaza killed at least 27 people, Palestinian medical officials said. The Israeli military said it targeted Palestinian militants, but people sheltering there said the strike hit a meeting of aid workers. An aid group said staff killed in strike on school.

The Israeli strike in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah killed 27 people, including a child and seven women, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where the bodies were brought. An Associated Press reporter saw ambulances streaming into the hospital and counted the bodies.

The Israeli military said it targeted a militant command and control centre inside the school, without providing evidence. Israel has repeatedly attacked schools that were turned into shelters in Gaza, accusing militants of taking cover in them.

Witnesses said the strike occurred while school managers were meeting with representatives of an aid group in a room normally used by Hamas-run police who provide security. They said there were no police in the room at the time.

The Palestinian branch of Terre des Hommes, a Swiss aid group, said in a statement that members of one of its children's health teams were killed in the strike, without specifying how many.

There were no militants. There was no Hamas, said Iftikhar Hamouda, who had fled from northern Gaza earlier in the war.

The Hamas-run government operated a civilian police force numbering in the tens of thousands. They largely vanished from the streets after the start of the war as Israel targeted them with airstrikes, but plainclothes Hamas security personnel still exert control over most areas.

Hamas has continued to launch attacks on Israeli forces more than a year after the Palestinian militants' October 7 attack on southern Israel that ignited the war. The militants stormed into Israel in that attack, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. They are still holding around 100 captives, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel's offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were fighters but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced around 90 per cent of its population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times.(With inputs from AP, Reuters)