Israel Says It Killed Hezbollah Commander in Airstrike Near Beirut
Israel launched a deadly strike in a densely populated Beirut suburb on Tuesday in retaliation for a rocket attack in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights that it blamed Hezbollah for and that killed 12 children and teenagers on a soccer field.
The target of the Israeli strike in a southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital was Fuad Shukr, a senior official who serves as a close adviser to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, according to three Israeli security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
The Israel Defense Forces later said in a statement that its fighter jets had “eliminated” Mr. Shukr, but there was no confirmation from Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed group, and the claim could not be independently verified.
Hezbollah has denied carrying out the attack in the Golan Heights on Saturday. The latest strikes were likely to fuel concerns that Israel’s long-running conflict with the group could escalate into a full-blown war even as Israel wages a military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after that group led a deadly assault in Israel on Oct. 7.
The attack on Tuesday is believed to be the first time since the war with Hamas began that Israel has targeted Hezbollah in Beirut. In January, an Israeli airstrike in a Beirut suburb killed Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader of Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.
The strike on Tuesday killed at least three other people — a woman and two children — and wounded at least 74 others, five critically, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health. Officials were still searching the rubble for other victims, the ministry said.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the strike, which he said had hit close to one of the country’s largest hospitals. A spokesman for António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, expressed “grave concern” about the attack.
The strike hit close to Hezbollah’s Shura Council, a central decision-making authority, Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported. Videos and photographs on social media showed smoke rising above buildings as darkness fell over Beirut, home to about 2.4 million people.
Crowds filled the streets after the strike in the neighborhood of Haret Hreik, which is the headquarters of Hezbollah and which was largely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in 2006 during the last war between the two sides.
Mohamed Awada, 52, a taxi driver who lives in Beirut’s southern suburbs, said he had been opening the door to his house when he “heard something like thunder and then a big explosion.”
“Everybody in the street was yelling and screaming,” he added. “It feels like we are already in a war.”
Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel in what it called a show of solidarity with Hamas after the assault on southern Israel in October. Since then, Israel and Hezbollah have traded thousands of strikes across the Israeli-Lebanese border, wrecking towns, killing hundreds and forcing more than 150,000 people in both countries to flee their homes.
The rocket attack on Saturday hit the Arab Druse village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. The Israeli military said that Hezbollah was the only militant group in the region with the type of rocket used in the strike, the Iranian Falaq-1. U.S. officials said it was a Hezbollah rocket fired from territory the group controls.
On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel promised a “severe” response to the rocket attack. But international diplomats have been pressuring Israel to be measured in its response, said one official familiar with the discussions. The United States was among the countries urging restraint, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Members of Israel’s security establishment also told the cabinet this week that it was not a good time to engage in a major war with Hezbollah, according to two Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Biden administration officials have repeatedly said this week that they were working toward a diplomatic solution to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. After the Israeli military reported it had struck Beirut on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters in Washington: “We do not believe that an all-out war is inevitable. We believe that it can still be avoided.”
Ms. Jean-Pierre added that the White House was still confident that a diplomatic solution to the conflict could be negotiated. “We have to continue to be optimistic here,” she said.
Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon’s foreign minister, said the United States had asked Lebanon’s government to relay a message to Hezbollah not to retaliate because of fears of a wider escalation. “We prefer no retaliation at all,” he told The New York Times. “But if there is a retaliation, we want it to be less than proportional.”
He added that he was trying to persuade Hezbollah to be restrained in any response.
Mr. Shukr was Hezbollah’s “most senior military commander,” and was responsible for the group’s precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, long-range rockets and drones, the Israeli military said.
After a senior Hezbollah commander, Mustafa Badreddine, was killed in Syria in 2016, Mr. Shukr assumed some of his responsibilities, said Hanin Ghaddar, an expert on Lebanese affairs and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Ms. Ghaddar said Mr. Shukr had been a powerful military figure within Hezbollah and was responsible for operations in southern Lebanon.
“He’s a very big target,” she said. “He would be the biggest loss for Hezbollah since Oct. 7.”
Mr. Shukr played a major role in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine compound in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen and wounded 128 others, according to the website of the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.
The program was offering up to $5 million for information on Mr. Shukr, and the State Department labeled him a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2019, the website read.
Before the strike on Tuesday, Giora Eiland, a retired major general in the Israeli military and former Israeli national security adviser, had predicted that Israel would carry out a limited strike in response to the attack on Majdal Shams.
“Israel cannot begin a total war in Lebanon today without real international support,” he said.
But General Eiland said he was concerned about a scenario in which Iran participated in the retaliation to an Israeli strike against Hezbollah.
“We’re facing terrible dangerous scenarios,” he said. “We have no choice but to be more careful.”
Hours before Israel struck near Beirut, Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was sworn in at a ceremony at the Iranian Parliament in the capital, Tehran. Mr. Pezeshkian beat a hard-line conservative in a July runoff election.
In the front row sat the leaders of regional militias backed by Iran and known as the “axis of resistance”: Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis.
During the ceremony, some in the audience broke out into chants of “death to America” and “death to Israel,” when Parliament’s speaker, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, mentioned the war in Gaza and U.S. support of Israel.
“We want a world where Palestinians are free from the clutches of injustice and occupation,” Mr. Pezeshkian said. “And the dreams of no Palestinian child is buried under the rubbles of their home. We can help realize this dream.”
The Iranian Embassy in Beirut “strongly condemned” the attack on Tuesday, calling it “cowardly and criminal,” according to Iranian news media.
Lebanese television channels showed footage of a building collapsed in on itself. Fire trucks and ambulances rushed through Beirut’s streets to the site.
The Lebanese Red Cross said in a statement that a residential building had been struck. The building had more than six floors and was badly damaged. Later Tuesday, the area around it was cordoned off.
The latest exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah come as Palestinians in Gaza have been told by the Israeli military to move to an area that the military has designated as a “humanitarian zone,” and that area keeps shrinking.
In the latest downsizing, the military this weekend ordered the evacuation of two more parts of central Gaza that had been part of the zone. Similar orders have forced more than 200,000 Palestinians to relocate over the past week alone, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military has said its recent evacuations and operations have targeted a renewed Hamas insurgency, and it has accused the group of launching rockets from the areas that fell under the latest evacuation order.
But the repeated redrawing of the zone’s borders was one more burden among many for Gaza’s 2.2 million people.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, said on Sunday that evacuation orders had affected “almost everyone in Gaza.”
The orders bring “more misery, fear and suffering for people who have nothing to do with this war,” Mr. Lazzarini said on social media.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Levenson, Ephrat Livni, Aaron Boxerman, Hiba Yazbek, Lauren Leatherby, Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda.
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