The scene after the Israeli attack on downtown Beirut

In the early hours of Thursday morning, a missile penetrated a building in central Beirut, far from the southern region where Hezbollah has the strongest presence.

Unlike many other attacks against Hezbollah in Beirut’s southern suburbs in recent days, the IDF did not issue an evacuation order in advance.

Five staff members and two volunteer paramedics at a medical facility in the same building were killed, according to the Hezbollah-linked emergency group Civil Defense. A total of nine people died, according to Lebanese authorities.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the attack “targeted the terrorist assets of the Hezbollah terrorist organization”.

A BBC News team went to the scene and tried to piece together what had happened.

One witness told the BBC: “I felt like my heart was going to stop. It was beating very, very loudly.”

The sound of the missile hitting the 12-story building was heard throughout the Lebanese capital, and smoke was still hanging in the air the next morning.

The target building is located in Bashoura, a predominantly residential area of ​​the city just meters away from the Lebanese Parliament Building.

It is more than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from Dahiya, where Hezbollah has a strong presence and has been the focus of Israeli attacks in recent weeks, including one last week that killed the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The Israel Defense Forces have launched hundreds of attacks in Lebanon over the past week and a half aimed at dismantling Hezbollah’s leadership and ability to launch rockets, missiles and drones into Israel – something the Iran-backed group has done almost daily since its inception The war in Gaza has been sparked since Palestinian ally Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel almost a year ago.

Tens of thousands of people, mainly Palestinians in Gaza, have been killed in the fighting since, and there have been dozens of attacks on Beirut in recent days. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, more than 2,000 people have died.

A few apartments below the second floor of Bachura’s high-rise building is a medical facility run by the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Council (IHC).

The group has a very extensive service network covering supermarkets and schools. It provides medical services to people living in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence, who rely on the center for treatment, medicine and nursing staff.

Shortly after midnight, the missile hit one of the centers.

Witnesses said the area was busy at the time and children started screaming when the explosion went off.

Work was still underway to clear the rubble when a BBC team arrived at the scene on Thursday morning.

Medical equipment such as gloves and masks could be seen in the wreckage.

Hassan Ammar, 82, told the BBC he had lived in the building that was attacked for 24 years with his wife and two daughters.

He described the medical service in his building as “helping all Lebanese” and “like the Red Cross, but belonging to an Islamic organization”.

“When we heard the strike, my wife and daughter and I ran out of the building and our apartment was severely damaged,” he said.

“This is a civilian facility – why would they target a civilian facility?”

The IDF has not commented on the Bachura attack but has repeatedly said it did not target civilian infrastructure.

The next morning, Hezbollah lawmaker Amin Sherri arrived at the scene surrounded by reporters.

In 2019, he was designated a terrorist financier by the U.S. Treasury Department, which accused him of threatening Lebanese bank officials and their families after freezing the account of a Hezbollah member.

The United States also accused him of having “extensive ties” to Hezbollah financiers and released a photo purportedly showing Sheri with the late Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was involved in an attack Before he was killed, he was the head of the overseas operations department of the Revolutionary Guards.

Hezbollah is designated a terrorist organization by the UK, US and EU.

Sherry held an impromptu press conference at the site of the attack on Thursday morning and accused the IDF of deliberately attacking medical facilities.

“We will continue this resistance and confrontation and we will not abandon our responsibilities,” he said.

Chaos reigned outside the devastated Bajaura Medical Center throughout the morning, with anger palpable.

One man said: “As soon as we heard the air raid, we ran out of the building, the children were screaming and sometimes you felt like your heart was going to stop beating.”

He insisted that the medical center provides services to many local people and has no political or military function.

BBC News was unable to gain access to the interior of the abandoned building.

People living above the center said they didn’t know where they were going tonight.

Kamal, a paramedic at the center, said staffing has been increased recently in light of the fighting.

“That’s why most of the casualties are medical personnel,” he said. He said some of the victims were sleeping when the missile hit.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell condemned Bashoula’s strike, saying the IDF was “again targeting health care workers”.

He said the attack killed civilians in a densely populated area and left others without access to emergency care, which he later characterized as a violation of international humanitarian law.

On Thursday, the World Health Organization said 28 health care workers had died in Lebanon in the previous 24 hours, and many more “did not report to work” as they were forced to flee.

Israel says it must fight Hezbollah in order to allow people in the north of the country to return home.

Additional reporting by Sean Seddon and Karin Toby