Israeli warplanes early Friday for the first time pounded the Uzai district of south Beirut near the airport while carrying out a series of raids in the east of Lebanon, police said.
Fighter-bombers launched 19 raids in less than an hour on the Uzai sector crossed by the highway leading to south Lebanon, added the police, who said the Israeli navy might have taken part in the ferocious bombardments.
The targets were not immediately clear.
Warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut causing panic among residents.
A huge pall of smoke mixed with flames rose over Uzai, beside the sea, as the sound of fighter-bombers screeching across the capital was interspersed by the impacts of exploding bombs.
A few hours earlier Israel had threatened to spread its bombardment to new areas of Beirut's southern suburbs, bastions of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement, and dropped leaflets calling on residents to flee.
Missiles were fired at the Rweiss and Haret-Hreik districts in south Beirut, police said. Rweiss, which had initially been spared, was first targeted the previous night after a week's respite in strikes on the capital's suburbs.
Haret-Hreik and Bir al-Abed, where Hezbollah's headquarters is located, were pounded for two weeks and are in ruins.
Three civilians were killed early Friday when Israeli warplanes hit several regions of Lebanon, police said.
Two died near Jwaya in the southern Tyre region when an Israeli jet fired a missile at their car. Six civilians had been wounded on Thursday in earlier air raids, police said.
A girl was killed and three other civilians were wounded in a raid on Budai, a village 20 kilometres (13 miles) west of Baalbek in the east of Lebanon, where two houses were badly damaged, the police said.
Israeli planes carried out seven raids in the mountainous Nahle region northeast of Baalbek in central Lebanon, targeting roads leading to Syria, Lebanese police said without reporting any victims.
For the second time since the start of the Israeli offensive launched against Lebanon on July 12 the road from Ouyoun as-Simane to Afqa northeast of Baalbek was bombed, the police said. The highway links the region to the Christian Kesrwan mountain north of Beirut.
Dozens of raids overnight Thursday to Friday shook several villages in the southern regions of Tyre and Nabatiyeh, relatively far from the border where there were violent clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters, the police said.
