For the second day, the Civil Defense Department continued its search for four more bodies in a collapsed building in the Haret Hreik district of Beirut's southern suburbs. The previous day, three bodies had been found in the building, known as Ayoub, which was destroyed by Israeli raids on Sept. 27.

Civil Defense will have recovered the seven bodies of people reported missing from the building. All were transported to Rafik Hariri Hospital in Beirut, where DNA tests will be carried out to identify them.

It was on Sept. 27, 2024 that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Haret Hreik, along with several of his companions, in an Israeli bombardment of rare violence. The Civil Defense statement did not specify whether this building had been destroyed in the same strike.

The southern suburbs of Beirut were one of the areas most heavily shelled by the Israeli air force during the two months of intense warfare with Hezbollah, between Sept. 23 and the cease-fire of Nov. 27. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, sometimes without warning, as in the Sept. 27 strike.

The war between Israel and Hezbollah began on Oct. 8, 2023, with a support front opened by the Shiite party in support of Gaza, in the wake of the Hamas movement's operation in Israel. But the conflict, long confined to southern Lebanon, spread suddenly last September to engulf parts of Beirut, the south and the Bekaa. More than 4,000 people have been killed, thousands wounded and billions of dollars worth of damage caused.