The death toll from a deadly Israeli airstrike on a building in south Lebanon village of Qana rose to 51 on Sunday, local witnesses and medics said.

Medics said that a total of 51 people including 22 children were killed in the Israeli air raid on a four-story building in Qana.

Altogether 63 local residents, most of them children and women,were taking cover in an underground shelter of the building when two missiles fired by Israeli aircraft slammed into the building.

The building totally collapsed and buried the dead and the wounded in the rubble, which hindered the rescue work, they added.

Meanwhile, Israeli army held Hezbollah responsibility for the incident, saying that Hezbollah was to blame as it used Qana as a rocket launch site.

It is not the first time for Qana, a small village in south Lebanon, to endure the pain of Israeli attacks when Israeli shelling killed more than 100 civilians sheltering at a UN post in Qana during an Israeli bombing campaign in April 1996.

Source: Xinhua