Hezbollah’s chief media officer and prominent spokesman Mohammad Afif was killed by an Israeli strike in central Beirut on Sunday.

Mr Afif was visiting the Syrian Ba’ath Party’s Lebanese headquarters in the Ras al-Naba’a neighbourhood of the capital when it was hit by an unannounced Israeli bombardment, Lebanese media said.

Ali Hijazi, the Ba’ath Party’s leader in Lebanon, later confirmed that Mr Afif had been killed in the attack.

Video footage from the scene showed rescuers searching for survivors among the rubble of a collapsed building.

Lebanon’s health ministry said one person had been killed and three others injured.

Ras al-Naba’a is a central Beirut district, around three miles from the city’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs where the vast majority of Israeli strikes have taken place.

Mr Afif was a long-time media advisor to Hezbollah’s former secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air attack on south Beirut on Sept 27.

He had joined the terror group in the early 1980s and managed Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station for several years before taking over its media relations office in 2014.

Mr Afif arranged numerous press conferences in Beirut’s southern suburbs in recent weeks, and was a point of contact for journalists.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the strike and did not issue an evacuation order before carrying out the attack.

The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman did not mention the strike, but said on social media that Israeli warplanes had targeted Hezbollah sites in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

“The terrorist [group] Hezbollah is deliberately establishing military structures within civilian areas throughout Lebanon with the aim of carrying out terrorist acts, placing its operatives and leaders in the heart of the civilian population,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“Prior to the raids, a series of steps were taken to reduce the possibility of civilian casualties, including intelligence gathering, aerial reconnaissance, and advance warnings to evacuate the area,” he added.

The spokesman said that the Israeli Air Force had attacked some 50 Hezbollah targets in the southern suburbs of Beirut this week, including the house of assassinated former leader Hassan Nasrallah.