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, witnesses said.

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

Meanwhile, 47 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured, most of them children and women, in overnight Israeli bombardment of the central Gaza Strip, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported on Friday. The attacks occurred in the city of Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al-Zawayda, it said.

The Israeli military said its troops had identified and eliminated “several armed terrorists” in central Gaza and had eliminated “dozens of terrorists” in targeted raids in northern Gaza’s Jabalia area.

In Beirut, Israeli military strikes followed a renewed but as yet of fruitless bout of US-led diplomacy aimed at getting a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon to stop over a year of fighting between Israel and Iran-backed groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

US 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 UN resolution, 1701, that would be the basis for ending the current conflict.

But time is running thin to get a resolution before US elections on November 5 and Lebanese officials and analysts were pessimistic after reports US 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.

The Gaza war began after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed about 44,000 Palestinians and reduced most of the enclave to rubble, Palestinian authorities say.

At least 46 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip on Thursday, mostly in the north where one attack hit a hospital, torching medical supplies and disrupting operations, the enclave’s health officials said.

Israel’s military has accused the Palestinian militant group Hamas of using Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya for military purposes and said “dozens of terrorists” have been hiding there. Health officials and Hamas deny the assertion.

The health ministry in the Gaza Strip called for all international bodies “to protect hospitals and medical staff from the brutality of the (Israeli) occupation”.

Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Thursday that one of its doctors at the hospital, Mohammed Obeid, had been detained last Saturday by Israeli forces. It called for the protection of him and all medical staff who “are facing horrific violence as they try to provide care”.

• A Reuters report