Hezbollah confirms leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death in Israeli strike

[Pelican Press 0]

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Hezbollah confirms leader Hassan Nasrallah’s ****** in ******** strike

The

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confirmed Saturday that its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been ******* in an I

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, even as ******* pressed ahead with a new round of

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and the region appeared to reel closer to all-out war.

The announcement came hours after *******’s military declared that it had ******* the 64-year-old Nasrallah, who helped found

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and had led the Iranian-backed group for three decades, in a devastating strike Friday evening in

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, a Hezbollah stronghold.

Overnight and into Saturday, ******** warplanes continued to pummel Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods on the city’s southern outskirts, leaving

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shrouded in choking smoke and lending apocalyptic air to the open-air encampments that sprang up overnight.

Thousands who fled devastated areas spent the night outdoors, huddling where they could in parks, squares and on walkways near the seafront promenade.

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The ****** of Nasrallah represents the most staggering ***** yet dealt to the Iranian-backed group by *******, which over a span of nearly two weeks turned a low-level campaign of retaliatory cross-border strikes into an all-out effort to decapitate the group.

The ******** military initially disclosed the ****** in a terse statement posted on social media.

“Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world,” it declared.

Later, it posted a graphic depicting 11 high-ranking members of Hezbollah’s military chain of command. Ten had the word “eliminated” beside their picture, including Nasrallah.

Hezbollah responded with seeming defiance, sending a heavy barrage of rockets across the border into *******.

The wave of ******** strikes caused widespread panic, with thousands of people trudging with backpacks, duffel bags, roller suitcases and **** cages as they fled their homes in the the densely populated suburb of Dahieh and the nearby Burj Al-Barajneh ******** camp.

Khaled Mustafa, a 45-year-old Syrian tailor from Aleppo who lived with his family for the last nine years in Haret Hreik, a neighborhood with many Hezbollah administrative offices, sat cross-legged in the shade of a palm tree on a sidewalk overlooking the Mediterranean. After a large ******** airstrike on the Dahieh on Friday evening, he left his apartment without taking any of his belongings.

“I sent my family to back to Syria last night. Eight people. I’m alone here,” Mustafa said. “I don’t know if I’ll go back to the apartment and pick stuff up. The Israelis say they want to hit the area again.”

Though he did not feel safe returning to Syria, a country embroiled in a civil war since 2011, it was still better than being in Dahieh, he said.

“Where can I go? What can I do? Sit on the streets here with no food, no water? Is this good?”

Hezbollah posted on its official social media channels a flyer with phone numbers that could facilitate transportation to Syria for those wanting to leave Lebanon.

A drive through Dahieh revealed a ghost town, with a few cars and scooters racing through abandoned thoroughfares, pausing at columns of smoke rising from the bowels of ******* sites before they sped off.

Even Hezbollah security officials, normally a constant presence on the streets here, were scarce, with only a few stragglers posted near struck areas.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s health ministry said in an update on Saturday that Dahieh hospitals were to be evacuated. It added that medical facilities in other parts of the city would suspend non-urgent cases until the end of next week to deal with the flood of casualties.

Hezbollah, a paramilitary faction and political party long, has long been viewed as *******’s top regional adversary.

Over the last 11 months, after Hezbollah launched cross-border attacks in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and ******, the two sides had engaged in an escalating series of strikes, but always falling short of full-scale conflict. On both sides of the border, tens of thousands fled their homes — some 90,000 Lebanese displaced from homes in the country’s south, and about 60,000 driven from northern ******** communities.

But *******’s calculation changed in recent weeks, with ******** Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying his government would make the ability of northern residents to return home a formal war objective. In the days following, ******* staged a two-day wave of detonations with ******-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, followed by intensive airstrikes and targeted pursuit of the group’s top leadership.

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On Saturday, before Nasrallah’s ****** was confirmed by Hezbollah, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a statement castigating ******* for “the massacre of the defenseless people of Lebanon.”

Denouncing the “Zionist entity” — a reference to ******* — the Iranian leader said that what he called the

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, would prevail. That encompasses forces including Hezbollah, the ************ groups ****** and the ************ Islamic ******, Houthi rebels in Yemen, various Syrian and Iraqi militias, and the Syrian government.

“All the resistance forces in the region stand by Hezbollah and support it.” Khamenei said.

Bulos reported from Beirut, King from Washington.

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#Hezbollah #confirms #leader #Hassan #Nasrallahs #****** #******** #strike

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