Israel pounds Beirut's southern suburbs

Israel pounded Beirut's southern suburbs with a series of powerful airstrikes early on Friday morning after issuing evacuation orders to residents, in the first such strikes in days targeting the dense urban area, Reuters witnesses said.

The Israeli military said it was targetting Hezbollah facilities and assets, an assertion that it has repeated over the course of dozens of strikes over more than a month in the neighborhood where the Iran-backed group holds sway.

The strikes followed a renewed but as yet of fruitless bout of U.S.-led diplomacy aimed at getting a ceasfire in Gaza and Lebanon to stop over a year of fighting between Israel and Iran-backed groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Israel and Lebanon were moving toward understandings on what is required for implementing a long-violated U.N. resolution, 1701, that would be the basis for ending the current conflict.

But time is running thin to get a resolution before U.S. elections on Nov. 5 and Lebanese officials and analysts were pessimistic after reports U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein would not be heading to Beirut from Israel, where he was on Thursday.

The conflict in Lebanon has dramatically escalated over the past five weeks, with most of the 2,800 deaths reported by the Lebanese health ministry for the past 12 months occurring in that period.

Lebanon's prime minister had expressed hope on Wednesday that a ceasefire deal with Israel would be announced within days as Israel's public broadcaster published what it said was a draft agreement providing for an initial 60-day truce.