Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images
Smoke rises from the site of a reported Israeli strike in Ghazieh, near Sidon, Lebanon, on April 18, 2025
(JNS) — The Israel Defense Forces “forcefully” struck a Hezbollah arms storage facility in Beirut on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed in a joint statement.
The strike in the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahiyeh in the southern part of the Lebanese capital targeted “infrastructure in Beirut where Hezbollah’s precision missiles were stored, which posed a significant threat to the State of Israel,” the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed.
“Israel will not allow Hezbollah to strengthen and to create any threat against it — anywhere in Lebanon,” it said. “The Dahiya district in Beirut will not serve as a safe haven for the Hezbollah terrorist organization.
“The Lebanese government bears direct responsibility for preventing these threats. Israel will persist in its war objective to safely return the residents of the north to their homes,” the PMO statement concluded.
According to the IDF, the Hezbollah storage site constituted a blatant violation of understandings between Israel and Lebanon. The terrorist organization systematically embedded its precision missiles amidst the Lebanese civilian population, cynically exploiting civilians as human shields.
The military noted that prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians, including issuing advance warnings and employing precision munitions.
Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli Air Force killed a Hezbollah terrorist advancing efforts to reestablish the group’s military infrastructure near Halta in southeastern Lebanon, near the Golan Heights.
The operative played a key role in Hezbollah’s attempts to rebuild its presence close to the Israeli border, in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, the IDF said.
The Beirut airstrike is part of ongoing Israeli efforts to block Hezbollah’s entrenchment in Southern Lebanon, amid heightened tensions since a fragile ceasefire took effect in November 2024. The ceasefire ended more than a year of attacks from Lebanon launched in support of Hamas after the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel.
“The IDF will continue to act to protect Israeli citizens and sovereignty,” the military said on Sunday.
