Lebanon was drawn into the war last week when Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes.

Israel, which had kept up strikes targeting Hezbollah even before the war despite a 2024 ceasefire, has launched attacks across Lebanon and sent ground troops into border areas.

Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) said that "the enemy targeted an apartment in the Aisha Bakkar area" in central Beirut, a densely populated neighbourhood close to one of the city's biggest shopping malls.

AFPTV's live broadcast showed the sound of an air strike followed by a fireball erupting in an apartment within a multi-storey residential building in Beirut.

There was no immediate confirmation of any casualties.

An AFP correspondent saw destroyed walls in a building's seventh and eighth floors with damaged cars nearby and security forces present at the scene.

When the strike hit "I ran from room to room, pulled my wife and daughter out of the rooms and hid them behind a wall, then the second strike hit", said Fawzi Asmar, owner of a bakery in the street where the strike took place.

Samer Knio, a civil defence paramedic, said glass and debris fell on his team as they were evacuating the dead and wounded from the scene, "but God protected us".

Last week the Israeli army targeted a hotel in central Beirut, with Iran saying that strike killed four of its diplomats.

- Southern suburbs -

Earlier Wednesday, an Israeli strike hit Beirut's southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hezbollah.

Israel had a day earlier reiterated its call for residents to evacuate the area before launching strikes.

Hezbollah said on Tuesday that its fighters had attacked Israeli troops near the southern border towns of Khiam and Odaisseh, and launched rockets at Israel including at a "missile defence site" south of Haifa.

It later said it was engaging an Israeli force near the border town of Aitaroun "with light and medium weapons".

Lebanese authorities said Tuesday that 759,300 people had been registered as displaced, with 122,600 staying in shelters.

The health ministry on Wednesday said that "successive raids launched by the Israeli enemy" on the southern town of Qana in Tyre district killed five people and wounded five others.

In Hennawiyeh, Tyre district, the ministry said the night prior that an Israeli strike wounded two people, and a follow-up attack killed them, along with a rescuer who came to the scene.

A strike on Zalaya in the southeast killed one, the ministry added.