Beirut: Twin bomb blasts claimed by the Islamic State group killed 41 people Thursday on a busy shopping street in a Beirut stronghold of the Shia movement Hezbollah, the worst such attack in years.

Speaking from the scene, Health Minister Wael Abou Faour said more than 200 people had been wounded, many of them in serious condition.

The blasts appeared to mark a return to a campaign of attacks that targeted the group’s strongholds between 2013 and 2014, ostensibly in revenge for its military support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The blasts hit a narrow shopping street in the Burj al-Barajneh neighbourhood that is also home to a street market.

IS claimed the blasts in an online statement.

“Soldiers of the Caliphate” detonated explosives planted on a motorbike in an area frequented by Shias, using a derogatory term to refer to the sect, the statement said.

‘After the apostates gathered in the area, one of the knights of martyrdom detonated his explosive belt in the midst of them,’ the statement added.

The claim could not be independently verified but it followed the usual format of IS claims of responsibility and was circulated on jihadist online accounts.

The army said the attacks were carried out by two suicide bombers and that the body of a third, who had failed to detonate his explosive device, had been found at the scene of the second blast.

Between July 2013 and February 2014, there were nine attacks on Hezbollah throughout Lebanon, mostly claimed by Sunni extremist group.

Despite ostensibly targeting Hezbollah, the victims of the attacks have been overwhelmingly civilians.

The deadliest in southern Beirut was in 2013, when 27 people were killed by a car bomb in the Rweiss district.

The attacks were claimed by several different Sunni groups, but all cited Hezbollah’s role in the conflict in Syria.

However the IS statement did not mention the conflict, instead using strictly sectarian language against Shiites.

Hezbollah is a staunch ally of the Syrian regime and is backed by Iran, another key supporter of the Damascus government.

In early 2013, it dispatched fighters to back government forces against a Sunni-dominated uprising that began with anti-regime demonstrations in March 2011.

Since then, it has become deeply involved in the conflict, deploying fighters throughout the country to bolster Assad’s troops on a range of battlefields.

At least 971 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.