SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
An Israeli airstrike in central Beirut has killed a senior Hezbollah official - the militant group's chief spokesman. The attack on the offices of an affiliated party came amid a wave of airstrikes in the Lebanese capital. NPR's Jane Arraf joins us from there. Hey, Jane.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Hi there.
DETROW: Tell us what happened.
ARRAF: Well, security officials say it was a drone attack, and it struck the offices of a party affiliated with Hezbollah without warning. Hezbollah says its media chief, Mohammad Afif, was killed in the attack. Israel claimed responsibility. It has been systematically assassinating Hezbollah officials and fighters since late September, when it killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Afif had served as Nasrallah's media adviser. He gave regular press conferences - the last one in Beirut just last week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MOHAMMAD AFIF: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Afif said Hezbollah was prepared for a long war and that despite continuous attacks in the south of Lebanon, Israel had not been able to hold any territory.
DETROW: You were at the site of the blast shortly after the airstrike. Tell us what you saw.
ARRAF: Well, we arrived as rescue workers were rushing out wounded on stretchers to ambulances.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: One man we spoke with had his head wrapped in a gauze bandage, and there was blood dripping onto the back of his jacket. He'd been displaced from the south of Lebanon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: He said, "we were sitting drinking coffee, looking at our phones, and then whoosh." Israel has dramatically escalated its airstrikes since September. In some places, it gives warnings shortly before the bombings, but that wasn't the case in this one.
DETROW: And there's this broadening, right? Israel seems to be widening its strikes outside these traditional Hezbollah areas. Tell us about the others in Beirut today.
ARRAF: One strike in central Beirut hit a computer shop, killing at least two people. Another killed the occupants of a vehicle in Mar Elias, a neighborhood that hasn't been targeted before. And Israel has daily been hitting Beirut's southern suburbs, saying it's targeting Hezbollah weapons and installations. Lebanon's health ministry, meanwhile, says about 3,400 people have been killed in those airstrikes - many of them women and children. We went to the site of one of the strikes in a Christian area of Beirut, the Hadath neighborhood.
That's where we found an apartment building hit by an air strike turned into a hill of concrete rubble. There was a young woman standing at the foot of it. She was crying while her brother dug through it, trying to retrieve her belongings. Her name was Rana (ph). She didn't want to give her last name for security reasons. And she said neighbors had banged on the door at 6 in the morning, telling them to get out. Israel had issued a warning that they were going to bomb the area.
RANA: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: She says she threw a robe on over her pajamas and rushed out barefoot. Seven minutes later, the building exploded.
RANA: (Speaking Arabic, crying).
ARRAF: Everything she owned was in there, including boxes and boxes of these tiny plastic toys. For two years, she'd stayed up late at night putting together children's gift bags to sell to shops. Some of the apartments in the building had been rented to displace Shia Muslims from the south of Lebanon. And that's a pattern recently as Israel targets displaced people in the communities they've fled to.
DETROW: The U.S. has been working to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, and there's talk from U.S. and Israeli officials that there might be a prospect of actually achieving one. What do people think about this in Lebanon?
ARRAF: Yeah. Well, Lebanon very much wants this war to end, as does Hezbollah, which has been weakened considerably, and Iran, which arms and funds Hezbollah. The Iranian envoy, Ali Larijani, was in Beirut, and he said there were positive elements in that new cease-fire proposal. But Israeli officials have indicated that they're demanding the right to attack even after a cease-fire, and that seems to be a deal breaker here. And in the meantime, Scott, many Lebanese believe these daily Israeli attacks on essentially an ever-widening range of targets seems to be aimed at bombing Hezbollah into submission and putting pressure on Lebanon to try to engineer an agreement with Israel.
DETROW: That is NPR's Jane Arraf in Beirut. Thank you so much.
ARRAF: Thank you, Scott.
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