Updated 18.31 | Published 17.25
High-ranking Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri has been killed in an attack in a suburb of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, Hamas said.
A total of four people are said to have been killed.
The Hamas television channel announced on Tuesday that Hamas terrorist Saleh al-Arouri has been killed by Israel in a “treacherous Zionist attack”.
A senior official in Beirut told AFP that al-Arouri was killed in the Israeli strike along with his bodyguards.
Saleh al-Arouri is one of the founders of Hamas’ military branch and has been responsible for the movement’s presence in the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to kill al-Arouri before the war broke out on October 7.
“Scalp for Israel”
The Lebanese news agency NNA reports that Israel used an attack drone to bomb a Hamas premises. Four people are said to have been killed.
Israel has not commented on the attack, according to AP.
Israel and Palestine expert Anders Persson calls Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri a “big fish”. If it is true that Israel has killed the leader, it will be seen as a great success in Israel, according to Persson.
– He is one in the leadership layer, which is then just below both the political and military leaders. This is a scalp for Israel, no doubt. If Israel is behind it, I cannot prove that at the moment, but everything points to it, says Persson, docent in political science at Linnaeus University, to TT.
Attacks on Israeli posts
According to Persson, al-Arouri was also one of Hamas’s most important public faces who regularly appeared on Al Jazeera and similar media.
Israel’s military and the extremist Lebanese Hezbollah militia have repeatedly fired at each other along Lebanon’s southern border since the war in Gaza broke out.
Earlier on Tuesday, Hezbollah stated that it has carried out several attacks against Israeli military posts along the border.