'Tens of thousands' of Hezbollah soldiers ready to fight

Hezbollah's chief has said that his group has tens of thousands of combatants ready to fight, adding that nowhere in Israel was off-limits to attacks.

Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have exchanged hostilities for over a year in parallel with the Gaza war but fighting has significantly escalated since late September, with Israeli troops intensifying bombing on swathes of Lebanon's south and making ground incursions into border villages.

"We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants" ready to fight, Naim Qassem said in a speech marking 40 days since his predecessor Hassan Nasrallah was killed.

The speech was Mr Qassem's second since he was named Hezbollah secretary-general last week.

He replaced Mr Nasrallah, the group's decades-long chief who was killed on 27 September in an Israeli air strike on Beirut's southern suburbs.

Hezbollah says it fired missiles at Israeli military base near airport

Lebanese rescuers have scoured a destroyed apartment building south of Beirut for bodies or any survivors after a deadly Israeli strike yesterday, as exchanges of fire between Israel and armed group Hezbollah pressed on.

Hezbollah said it had fired a salvo of missiles on an Israeli military base near Ben Gurion Airport.

Sirens sounded in northern and central Israel and Israeli media reported a rocket had landed near the airport.

The airport's authority said it was continuing to operate as usual and Israel's leading airline El Al said none of its planes were damaged from rockets hitting near central Israel.

The strike on Barja yesterday hit a multi-storey apartment building on a hilltop, shearing off segments of the floors and exposing inner walls and staircases.

Lebanon's health ministry said just before midnight that the strike had killed 20 people and wounded 14 but said the toll could still rise.

Moussa Zahran, who lived on one of the upper floors of the building, returned to sift through the ruins of his home.

His burned feet were wrapped in gauze and his son and wife were in hospital after being wounded in the strike.

"These rocks that you see here weigh 100 kilos, they fell on a 13-kilo kid," he said, referring to his son and the apartment wall that had collapsed onto him during the strike.

New Israeli defence minister vows to 'defeat’ Hezbollah

It was not immediately clear if the strike was targeting a member of Hezbollah.

There was no evacuation warning ahead of the air raid and there were no immediate reports of casualties.

Israel's military has carried out strikes on the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh after issuing evacuation orders for specific neighbourhoods in the city.

More than 3,000 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon over the last year, the vast majority in the past six weeks.

The Barja attack was among the deadliest single strikes.

Diplomatic efforts to reach a 60-day truce proposed by the US faltered last week, and Lebanese were fearful that the war could escalate further after Mr Netanyahu appointed close ally Israel Katz as his new defence minister.

Mr Katz vowed yesterday to "defeat" Hezbollah so that people displaced from northern Israel could return home.

Lebanon's parliament speaker Nabih Berri - a Hezbollah ally and diplomatic interlocutor - met the US and Saudi ambassadors to Lebanon to discuss political developments, his office said, without providing further details.

Lebanon files UN complaint against Israel over pager attacks

Lebanon said that it had filed a complaint with the United Nations' labour agency over deadly attacks on communication devices across the country in September, which it blames on Israel.

Lebanese Labour Minister Mustafa Bayram called the attack an "egregious war against humanity, against technology, against work", saying his country had filed the complaint with the International Labour Organization in Geneva.

"It's a very dangerous precedent," he told journalists in the Swiss city at an event organised by the UN correspondents' association ACANU.

Israel has not officially taken responsibility for those attacks, but Mr Bayram said it was "widely accepted internationally... that Israel was behind this heinous act".

"In a few minutes, more than 4,000 civilians fell, between martyrs and injured and maimed," he said, speaking through a translator.

Among the victims not killed, he said many people had "lost their fingers; some have totally lost their eyesight".

"We are in a situation where ordinary objects, objects you use in daily life, become dangerous and lethal," he said.

"If left unchecked, this crime could become normalised," he said, adding that filing the complaint was meant "to prevent such crimes from happening in the future".

"I consider it a moral obligation to my country and to the world."

Asked why Lebanon had chosen to file the complaint with the ILO, Mr Bayram pointed to all the workers who were on the job when pagers and walkie-talkies- tools they used to do their work-suddenly exploded.

"We deemed it necessary to point out that this runs contrary to work environment, security and safety, contrary to decent work principles... defended by the ILO," he said.

Mr Bayram added that Lebanese authorities could still file complaints over the pager attacks in other international forums, including the World Trade Organization.

"In more general terms, the Lebanese government wants to... present a myriad of complaints" against Israel over its operations in the country, he said, since "the amount of crimes is huge".