Israel provided no evidence for its claim that cash was being kept under the hospital. Instead, it circulated an animated graphic suggesting that a Hezbollah bunker was underneath the medical centre, where it said the group’s former secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike on 27 September, had sheltered.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, just a minutes-drive from Sahel Hospital, a neighbourhood was mourning an Israeli attack the night before. The strike on the Jnah area, in Beirut’s southern Ghobeiry municipality, killed 18 people, four of them children, and wounded 60 more, according to Lebanese health authorities.

An entire apartment building was flattened in the crowded residential area where Lebanese, Syrian and Sudanese families were living, some of whom had already fled their homes under Israeli fire in the country’s south.

“[Israel] is striking civilians, all civilian organisations and places,” the mayor of Ghobeiry, Maan Khalil, told the press at the site.

When the building was hit, at around 10:30pm on Monday night, Khalil said that “people were sleeping, most of them were women and children.”

Israel had warned residents to leave just a mere 15 minutes before the strike, an insufficient amount of time for everyone to leave their homes.

On Tuesday afternoon, Israel issued another order for residents in a different neighbourhood in Ghobeiry to leave their homes. Less than 30 minutes later, a 2,000-pound bomb barrelled toward an apartment building, bringing it to the ground.