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Israel said on Tuesday it had killed a senior Hizbollah commander in an air strike on Beirut, stating the operation was retaliation against the individual responsible for a deadly rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The Israeli military said Fuad Shukr died in the attack on an area of southern Beirut that is a Hizbollah stronghold.
The Israel Defense Forces described Shukr as Hizbollah’s most senior military commander and right-hand man to Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group. Hizbollah has yet to make an official comment about the Israeli strike.
The Israeli attack will stoke fears that intensifying clashes between Israel and Hizbollah could trigger a full-blown war despite a flurry of US-led diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation.
Tuesday’s strike marks the first time Israel has targeted a Hizbollah figure in Beirut since hostilities erupted between the two sides after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its attack on the Jewish state on October 7.
The IDF said Shukr had helped plan and direct wartime operations by Hizbollah on Israel since October.
“Hizbollah’s ongoing aggression and brutal attacks are dragging the people of Lebanon and the entire Middle East into a wider escalation. While we prefer to resolve hostilities without a wider war the IDF is fully prepared for any scenario,” said Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari.
The IDF said Shukr was behind last Saturday’s strike on Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which was the deadliest incident for civilians in Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hizbollah started exchanging almost daily fire nearly 10 months ago.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Hizbollah had “crossed the red line” with the strike, which killed 12 youngsters on a football pitch in the town. Hizbollah denied responsibility.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the Israeli strike on Tuesday, carried out with a drone that launched three rockets, had targeted the area around Hizbollah’s governing Shura Council in the densely populated Haret Hreik neighbourhood in Beirut.
A large explosion ripped through the area, with television footage showing several floors of a residential building badly damaged and large plumes of smoke rising from it.
At least three people were killed — a woman and two children — and a further 74 people were injured, some critically, the Lebanese ministry of health said.
Washington has described Shukr as a senior adviser to Nasrallah on military affairs and a member of Hizbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council. The US placed Shukr on its specially designated global terrorist list in 2019.
The critical question will be how Hizbollah, which is considered one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors, responds to the Israeli strike.
Hizbollah has previously warned Israel against “any assassination on Lebanese soil against a Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian or Palestinian”, suggesting this would be met with a decisive response.
“The Israeli enemy has committed a great stupid act in size, timing and circumstances by targeting an entirely civilian area,” Hizbollah official Ali Ammar told the group’s Al-Manar TV following the Israeli strike. “The Israeli enemy will pay a price for this sooner or later.”
The hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah have resulted in casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanon border.
But they had been mostly contained to the border region, with neither side apparently wanting to escalate to all-out war.
Speaking in the aftermath of the Israeli strike, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration was pushing for a diplomatic solution to bring an end to the hostilities.
“We do not believe that an all-out war is inevitable and we believe it can still be avoided,” she added.
Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the Israeli attack as “a blatant violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as a grave breach of international laws”.
The UN special co-ordinator for Lebanon called for calm. “There is no such thing as a military solution,” Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said, urging Israel and Lebanon to explore all diplomatic avenues.
Fears of an escalation had been heightened earlier on Tuesday when an Israeli civilian was killed in a rocket attack in HaGoshrim, a kibbutz a few kilometres from the Israeli border with Lebanon.
The Israeli military said about 10 rockets had “crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory”, and that while most were intercepted, one had struck a kibbutz, resulting in the death.
Hizbollah said it had launched two salvos of Katyusha rockets at the nearby Beit Hillel barracks, “in response to” an Israeli strike on the town of Jibchit in Lebanon.
The group also said it had fired at Israeli fighter jets that broke the sound barrier in Lebanese air space, forcing the aircraft to turn around. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Felicia Schwartz in Washington
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari
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