°®Âþµº

Lebanon's health ministry said Thursday at least 22 people had been killed in Israeli strikes on Beirut -- the third such attack on the capital since Israel escalated its air campaign last month.

Israel has repeatedly pounded southern Beirut suburbs for more than two weeks but strikes have rarely targeted the city centre.

"The Israeli enemy's attacks on the capital Beirut this evening killed, according to a preliminary toll, 22 people and injured 117 others," the ministry said in a statement.

Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA) said the strikes hit the densely populated neighbourhoods of Nweiri and Basta.

"The first strike in Beirut targeted the third floor of an eight-storey building" in the Nweiri area, and a second strike hit "a four-storey building... in al-Basta al-Fouqa, which completely collapsed," the NNA.

An AFP photographer at the site of the strike in the Basta area said two old buildings had collapsed, while the windows of surrounding homes had been blown out with the force of the explosion.

Civil defence members and local residents were attempting to pull survivors out of the mountain of rubble, with some of them carried away on stretchers.

Firefighters were working to put out a blaze in a "residential building" hit in the Nweiri area, with residents being evacuated from the upper floors using a ladder, NNA reported.

Immediately after the raids, AFP live footage showed two plumes of smoke billowing in between densely-packed buildings.

Earlier this month, Israel carried out a deadly air raid in Beirut, hitting an emergency services rescue facility, killing seven workers, the service said.

On 30 September, an Israeli drone strike on a building in Beirut's busy Cola district killed three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the leftist armed group said.

Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement and its foe Israel have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire for nearly a year in fallout from the Gaza war.

But since 23 September, Israel has escalated its air strikes on targets in Lebanon, killing more than 1,200 people and forced more than one million to flee their homes, according to official figures.