'This Madness Has to Stop': Israeli Airstrike Totally Collapses Beirut Apartment Building

An Israeli airstrike totally demolished a large apartment building in central Beirut on Wednesday, following a night of attacks on densely populated residential areas, several of which reportedly came without warning.

Videos shared to social media and by local media outlets show the 10-story building, located in the Bachoura neighbourhood in central Beirut, suddenly collapsing into rubble in the early hours of the morning after being struck with a missile.

Israeli authorities issued a forced displacement order to residents of the building over social media around 4 am local time, roughly an hour before the strike. It warned residents of buildings in the Bachoura area that they were "located near Hezbollah facilities" and needed to move at least 300 meters away.

Israel has claimed the building was used by the militant group Hezbollah to stash large sums of money, but has provided no evidence publicly.

Citing Lebanon's Health Ministry, the Associated Press reported that at least four people were wounded in the attack, which sent emergency teams rushing to the scene through a plume of black smoke.

Residents of the collapsed apartment building have taken to social media to describe their horror at seeing their home suddenly destroyed.

"I am a US citizen and surgeon who took care of the Boston Marathon bombing victims in 2013," said Haytham Kaafarani, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. "I paid for seven years to own a small apartment in downtown Beirut for my three kids to enjoy summers there. Today, Israel reduced my dream home to rubble, with American weapons, paid by my taxes."

Another professor, Bilal R. Kaafarani, who teaches chemistry at the American University of Beirut, said something similar.

"Israel demolished the building I have an apartment in. It took 22 years of my work here and 20 years of my wife’s work to own this apartment," he said. "This madness has to stop."

The attack came after a night of intense airstrikes upon civilian areas in Lebanon's capital, which reportedly came without warning in the middle of the night and into the early morning.

According to Lebanese authorities, at least 20 people were killed in a series of attacks on Beirut and the southern and eastern parts of the country, while dozens more were injured.

Lebanon's health ministry reported that more than 900 people have been killed and 2,200 injured in Israel's latest round of attacks in Lebanon, which began on March 2 after Hezbollah retaliated against the US-Israeli war in Iran.

The attacks beginning Tuesday night came less than a day after Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that "deliberately attacking civilians or civilian objects amounts to a war crime,” noting that hundreds of homes and other civilian infrastructure, including health facilities, had been destroyed by prior Israeli attacks in Beirut.

Israel has issued evacuation orders that have forced more than 1 million Lebanese people from their homes as part of an expanding ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

Sara Saleh, a 29-year-old taking shelter in a nearby school after being forced from her home in Beirut's southern suburbs, told the Agence France-Presse that she and her family "were asleep" when Israel's warning came down early Wednesday morning. She said they were left to flee for safety in their pajamas.

She said the attack on the apartment "was terrifying... all of Beirut shook." Speaking with a face mask to protect herself from dust kicked up by the demolished building, she said her sister's children "started crying and panicking, it was heartbreaking."

The mass displacement of civilians in Lebanon and Iran has been met with increasing criticism from UN experts and human rights organizations.

As reports of the apartment bombing rolled in, Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that "international law is being openly ignored" and that "impunity reigns and disproportionate actions are being normalized amid the escalating conflicts in the Middle East."

"It is a vicious circle," he said. "The more violations, the stronger the culture of impunity becomes."