Powerful blast kills 14 people in Hizbollah’s Beirut stronghold

A huge car bomb killed at least 14 people in the pro-Hizbollah southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday evening, officials said, the deadliest attack on the Shia group’s heartlands in years.

Firefighters were struggling to extinguish flames as dusk fell in the residential Rweiss district while people tried to sweep up the shattered glass carpeting the streets.

More than 200 people were injured in the blast, according to the National News Agency.

A militant group calling itself the Brigades of Aisha claimed responsibility for the attack, Reuters reported, threatening Hizbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a video statement that there would be “more, God willing”.

It was not immediately clear who this group was or whether the claim was plausible, but residents were convinced Syrian militants were behind the attack. Since Hizbollah began openly to intervene on behalf of the regime in the civil war in neighbouring Syria in May, Hizbollah areas have been hit with rockets. Last month a car bomb was detonated in another Shia area of southern Beirut.

“We expected it: this is the new type of war. We’ve become like Iraq,” said Mahdi, 25, speaking a few metres from the blast site.

Mahdi said that the bomb had exploded next to a shop selling Arabic sweets and pastries, making people in the area afraid for the first time to be living there.

“They didn’t face that kind of war before,” he explained.

Saad Hariri, who heads a mainly Sunni party opposed to Hizbollah, condemned the attack as a “horrific” crime aimed at “harming this country, which is struggling to keep away from the surrounding fires”.

Lebanon, a volatile country at the best of times, has seen a steady increase in security incidents as regional tension relating to the Syria conflict have risen.

Late on Wednesday evening Mr Nasrallah added to a sense of mounting pressure on Lebanon’s stability by claiming that four Israeli soldiers wounded near the border between the two countries last week were targeted by Hizbollah.

Lebanon’s army has said that the soldiers were on Lebanese territory, while Israel maintains they were carrying out routine activities along the border.

Mr Nasrallah told al Mayadeen TV that his group had received intelligence that the Israelis were planning to enter Lebanon and prepared bombs to detonate.