Hurricane Helene, a powerful Category 4 storm when it made landfall, carved out a devastating path from Florida’s Gulf Coast to Tennessee. Reports of destruction and record-level flooding stretched more than 600 miles. As of Saturday, officials had reported at least 60 deaths from the storm.

The blasts could be heard throughout Beirut, an earth-shaking thunder that rolled across the city on Friday evening. For Doctor Jihad Saadeh, director of Lebanon’s largest public hospital, it was the beginning of a sleepless night full of carnage.

Saadeh’s private clinic was just a few hundred metres away from the target of Israeli jets that dropped bombs on at least six residential buildings that collapsed before his eyes. Their aim was to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, who was confirmed dead on Saturday.

“We saw the jets of red smoke shoot up into the sky, the buildings just collapsed,” he said. He had raced from his clinic to the Rafik Hariri hospital to ready his staff.

“We got only bodies at first,” he said. “The buildings just collapsed. All of them were below the rubble. There were no injuries, just fatalities.”

The bombing wreaked havoc across Lebanon, from Beirut’s southern suburbs to the Bekaa Valley in the east and across the south. Israeli warplanes pummeled areas far from Hizbollah’s traditional pockets of support, including in Mount Lebanon and Chouf.

Massive plumes of orange and red smoke billowed from between Beirut’s densely-packed apartment buildings as the sound of sirens filled the city that endured at least 11 air strikes on Friday night and Saturday morning, according to Lebanese state news.  

The strikes that killed Nasrallah flattened multiple residential buildings. When the sun rose, a massive crater left by the bombs in Dahiyeh, was visible from the hills surrounding Beirut.

Lebanon’s health ministry asked hospitals near Beirut that had not been struck to stop accepting non-urgent cases to make room for patients who were being evacuated from hospitals in the capital’s southern suburbs.

The bombings killed at least 33 people and injured 195, the health ministry said on Saturday. That is probably an undercount as it represents only hospitals that reported their data to the ministry.

A tense period of mourning took hold in Beirut in the hours after Hizbollah confirmed Nasrallah’s killing on Saturday. Shops closed across the city.

Israel, meanwhile, continued its assault against Hizbollah, saying it had killed another of the group’s commanders in a strike on Dahiyeh on Saturday, the southern suburb where Nasrallah was assassinated. As its drones buzzed incessantly over Beirut, the Israeli military vowed to keep up its attacks.

Many families who fled their homes were dazed and frightened, struggling to come to terms with what had happened.

After assassinating Nasrallah on Friday night, the Israeli military warned residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs to evacuate for “your safety and the safety of your loved ones” as it prepared to step up its bombing campaign.

The orders, posted on social media platform X, sparked fear as they marked specific buildings across neighbourhoods, identifying them by the families that lived there or the cafés on their bottom floors. It told residents living there and in the surrounding buildings to leave immediately because the Israeli military would be “forced to act against these [Hizbollah] interests in the immediate future”. 

Residents of the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut’s southern suburbs said panic spread rapidly through its narrow alleys and concentrated buildings when Israel warned that the surrounding neighbourhood would be bombed. 

One woman from the camp, a Palestinian refugee who had fled Syria to Lebanon in 2012, had to run again on Friday night, this time to a seaside walkway.

“We fled from the horror. As soon as we heard the evacuation orders, we left,” she said. Her family stood on the side of a dark highway as the sound of air strikes reverberated around them before a van finally offered them a lift.

“We’re definitely not going back. They’re still bombing,” she said. 

All around her were families who had made the same journey. As the sun climbed higher along Beirut’s corniche where the refugees had sought sanctuary, exhausted fathers strung blankets between palm trees to create shade for their families.

Plastic bottles and potato chip bags littered the walkway that would normally be thronged with joggers and ping-pong players. Instead, children and grandparents sat on the ground eating bread and drinking tea that had been passed out by volunteers. 

Fatima, an 18-year old girl who asked that her real name not be used, had fled from the suburb of Lailaki with her family after midnight. When the bombings first started on Friday evening, they initially decided to remain in their home. 

But the explosions were so intense, so loud and so close that she lost consciousness.

“I fainted,” she said. “Our house became like paper,” she added, moving her hand to show the way her home had seemed to fold and shake. 

The family decided to leave only after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for houses in their neighbourhood 

Surrounded by her suitcases on the seaside boardwalk, Zaynab, Fatima’s aunt, said she did not know where she would go next or if she would be able to return to her home.

“We don’t even know if our house is still there to go back to,” Zaynab said. 

Israel has killed Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on Beirut, in the latest in a series of devastating blows to the Lebanese militant group.

The strike in a densely populated residential neighbourhood in southern Beirut was part of an intense bombardment carried out by Israeli forces on Friday and marked a dramatic escalation of Israel’s offensive against Hizbollah.

The Lebanese group confirmed Nasrallah’s death in a statement on Saturday, saying he had joined the group’s long list of “martyrs”. It said its leadership would continue to battle against Israel “in support of Gaza and Palestine, and in defence of Lebanon and its steadfast and honourable people”.

Speaking late on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Nasrallah’s killing was a necessary step toward achieving the goals we have set,” including “changing the balance of power in the region for years to come”.

He added that the “work is not yet done”, warning Israelis that they “will face significant challenges in the days ahead”.

He also issued a warning to Israel’s adversaries. “There is nowhere in Iran or the Middle East beyond the reach of the long arm of Israel, and today you know how true that is,” Netanyahu said.

Herzi Halevi, chief of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said the strike did not mark the conclusion of Israel’s operations. “This is not the end of our toolbox,” he said. “The message is simple: anyone who threatens the citizens of Israel — we will know how to reach them.”

US President Joe Biden said Nasrallah’s death was “a measure of justice for his many victims”.

“The United States fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself against Hizbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups,” he said in a statement released on Saturday. “Ultimately, our aim is to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts in both Gaza and Lebanon through diplomatic means.”

It was time to conclude deals to end the conflict in both Gaza and Lebanon, Biden added.

Israel claimed the strike had also killed the head of Hizbollah’s southern front, Ali Karaki, and other senior commanders. It was the latest in a succession of debilitating Israeli attacks on Iranian-backed Hizbollah’s chain of command.

A senior commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Abbas Nilforoushan, who was in a meeting with Nasrallah was also killed, an Iranian official told the Financial Times. The death of the commander and Nasrallah, one of Iran’s closest allies, raised the risk of retaliation by the Islamic republic.

On Friday, Lebanese officials warned an Iranian cargo plane to leave the country’s airspace because of the risk Israel could target it, the Iranian official said. The Israeli military had said Israeli air force planes were “patrolling the area of Beirut airport” and would not allow “hostile flights with weapons to land” there.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the fate of the Middle East “will be determined by resistance forces, the foremost of which is Hizbollah”.

He added that the group’s “solid structure cannot be significantly damaged” by “Zionist criminals” who he said had demonstrated their “short-minded and stupid policies”.

He urged all Muslims to stand by Hizbollah in its fight against “an occupying and vicious regime”.

At least 11 people were killed and 108 injured in the strike that killed Nasrallah, Lebanon’s health ministry said. That figure was expected to rise as rescue workers continued searching for survivors.

On Saturday, explosions were heard in Beirut as Israel continued to strike Hizbollah targets and announced it had killed a top member of the group’s intelligence department responsible for selecting targets in Israel.

The Israeli military also posted warnings on social media telling Lebanese to evacuate the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon.

The IDF said it had intercepted a missile fired from Yemen that set off air raid sirens across central Israel. Late on Saturday, sirens also sounded in parts of Jerusalem, as the IDF reported a rocket incoming from Lebanon.

Lebanese leaders from across the political spectrum called for unity, reflecting concerns that the fragile nation could slide into civil strife in the wake of Nasrallah’s assassination.

“We differed a great deal with the deceased and his party and we rarely found common ground, but Lebanon was a tent for all, and in this deeply difficult time our unity and solidarity is fundamental,” Saad Hariri, former prime minister, said in a statement.

Nasrallah’s death capped a disastrous two weeks for Hizbollah during which it has sustained the heaviest succession of blows in its four decades of existence.

Residents of Beirut said the Israeli bombing raids on Friday night and during the early hours of Saturday had been some of the most intense in the city since Israel and Hizbollah fought a 34-day war in 2006.

Explosions lit up the sky throughout the night and threw huge clouds of dust into the air. Hundreds of people fled the south of the city, where Hizbollah is entrenched, to seek shelter on beaches and in public squares.

Over the past two weeks, Israel has escalated its offensive against the militant group, killing a string of its senior commanders. This week it embarked on an intense bombardment of sites across Lebanon that killed more than 600 people and displaced more than 90,000.

On Wednesday, Israel called up two reserve brigades for “operational missions” in the north of the country, with Halevi telling troops to prepare for a possible ground offensive in Lebanon.

The Israeli military said it was continuing its bombardment on Saturday, carrying out “extensive” bombing raids in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon as well as striking more targets in Beirut, after warning civilians in some densely populated neighbourhoods to evacuate.

Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Andrew England in London