Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut is in shock tonight when massive explosions tore through the civilian neighborhood of Dahieh, in the city’s south, as the result of a major Israeli attack. This is the first attack on Beirut in over a month.
Israel issued an evacuation order in the evening, claiming that Hezbollah had an underground drone factory in the city. The attack came a few hours later, after sunset.
Information is still coming in about what happened, but reportedly eight buildings were hit in the targeted neighborhood, and later reports said there were more than a dozen strikes. It is not clear whether those are the same buildings that were cited in the evacuation warning, and since Israel was targeting an underground site, it’s not clear that the surface buildings were the target in the first place.
Israel bombed Beirut’s Dahieh neighborhood around Sunset June 5, 2025 | Image from X
Adding to the questions which have yet to be answered are reports that Lebanese Army forces entered the buildings identified by Israel before the strike. It’s neither clear if the Army was present when the strikes began or whether those buildings ended up being hit at all, but it could potentially add to the seriousness of the matter. There are still no confirmations of casualties.
People reported that there were substantial traffic jams in Dahieh as everyone moved to try to evacuate before the strike. It may well reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, though again we don’t yet have word of what the hit buildings were or whether anyone was left within.
Israel claimed the existence of the alleged underground site was a ceasefire violation, but it has yet to be established that there actually was such a site there, and moreover it’s not clear from the terms of the ceasefire that Hezbollah wouldn’t have been allowed to have an underground facility in Beirut, which is far north of the Litani River boundary they’re supposed to be removed from.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Israel would not allow anyone to “create threats” to Israel, though Hezbollah has not actually attacked Israeli territory a single time since the ceasefire went into effect in November, so the timing of this attack is odd, to say the least.
Adding to the timing question was that the attack came roughly around sunset, meaning the important religious feast of Eid al-Adha had just begun. Thursday marked the Yawn Arafah, a very important holiday where Muslims who do not go to Mecca that year generally fast. Sunset marks the end of the fast and the beginning of the feast, and Israeli strike roughly coincided with that.
Though Hezbollah’s violation of the ceasefire here is still up for dispute, Israel’s plainly isn’t, and multiple Lebanese leaders issued statements condemning Israel’s attack on the capital as a particularly “flagrant” violation. Israel has carried out thousands of attacks on Lebanese soil since the ceasefire went into effect, but attacking Beirut has been comparatively unusual.
