Israel Says It Killed Hezbollah Commander in Airstrike Near Beirut

[Pelican Press 0]

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******* Says It ******* Hezbollah Commander in Airstrike Near Beirut

******* launched a deadly strike in a densely populated Beirut suburb on Tuesday in retaliation for a rocket ******* in the ********-controlled Golan Heights that it blamed Hezbollah for and that ******* 12 children and teenagers on a soccer field.

The target of the ******** 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 ******** security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.

The ******* 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 ******* in the Golan Heights on Saturday. The latest strikes were likely to fuel concerns that *******’s long-running conflict with the group could escalate into a full-blown war even as ******* wages a military offensive against ****** in the Gaza Strip after that group led a deadly ******** in ******* on Oct. 7.

The ******* on Tuesday is believed to be the first time since the war with ****** began that ******* has targeted Hezbollah in Beirut. In January, an ******** airstrike in a Beirut suburb ******* Saleh al-Arouri, a senior leader of ******, which is also backed by Iran.

The strike on Tuesday ******* 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 ******* Nations secretary general, expressed “grave concern” about the *******.

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 ******** 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 **********.”

“Everybody in the street was yelling and screaming,” he added. “It feels like we are already in a war.”

Hezbollah began ******* into northern ******* in what it called a show of solidarity with ****** after the ******** on southern ******* in October. Since then, ******* and Hezbollah have traded thousands of strikes across the ********-Lebanese border, wrecking towns, ******** hundreds and forcing more than 150,000 people in both countries to flee their homes.

The rocket ******* on Saturday hit the ***** Druse village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. The ******** 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 ******* promised a “severe” response to the rocket *******. But international diplomats have been pressuring ******* to be measured in its response, said one official familiar with the discussions. The ******* States was among the countries urging restraint, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Members of *******’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 ******** 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 ******* and Hezbollah. After the ******** 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 ******* 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,

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.

After a senior Hezbollah commander, Mustafa Badreddine, was ******* 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 ******** of a U.S. Marine compound in Beirut that ******* 241 ********* servicemen and wounded 128 others, according to the website of the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.

The program was offering

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on Mr. Shukr, and the State Department labeled him a “specially designated global **********” in 2019, the website read.

Before the strike on Tuesday, Giora Eiland, a retired major general in the ******** military and former ******** national security adviser, had predicted that ******* would carry out a limited strike in response to the ******* on Majdal Shams.

“******* 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 ******** strike against Hezbollah.

“We’re facing terrible dangerous scenarios,” he said. “We have no choice but to be more careful.”

Hours before ******* 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 ************* 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, ******, ************ Islamic ****** and the Houthis.

During the ceremony, some in the audience broke out into chants of “****** to America” and “****** to *******,” when Parliament’s speaker, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, mentioned the war in Gaza and U.S. support of *******.

“We want a world where Palestinians are free from the clutches of injustice and occupation,” Mr. Pezeshkian said. “And the dreams of no ************ child is ******* under the rubbles of their home. We can help realize this dream.”

The Iranian Embassy in Beirut “strongly condemned” the ******* on Tuesday, calling it “cowardly and *********,” according to Iranian news media.

Lebanese television channels showed footage of a building collapsed in on itself. ***** 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 ******* and Hezbollah come as Palestinians in Gaza have been told by the ******** 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 ******* Nations.

The ******** military has said its recent evacuations and operations have targeted a renewed ****** 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,

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that evacuation orders had affected “almost everyone in Gaza.”

The orders bring “more misery, ***** 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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#******* #******* #Hezbollah #Commander #Airstrike #Beirut

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