15 high-ranking Hezbollah members dead • Attacked with robots in the middle of rush hour
On Saturday, the rescue work continued amidst the chaos after the Israeli airstrike on a residential building in a suburb in southern Lebanon. Among the 37 confirmed dead are at least three children, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.
– Everyone says it will get worse. It has only just begun. says Hassan whom TV4 News meets in Beirut.
Earlier, the extremist Islamist militia Hezbollah had published a list of 15 names of members killed, hailing them as participants “in the holy war”. Ibrahim Aqil was at the top, and so internationally notorious that the US had announced a $7 million bounty on his head.
Civilians injured
Another man, Ahmad Wahabi, is also called “commander” in the list – a title Hezbollah rarely uses, indicating that he had a heavy role in the movement’s warfare, writes The Times of Israel newspaper.
During Saturday, fighting continued in the border area between Lebanon and Israel. Israel’s military states that it hit, among other things, thousands of rocket launchers. The fire against southern Lebanon then continued with high intensity during the evening. According to Israel’s military, Hezbollah has fired upwards of a hundred rockets at Israeli targets.
Friday’s attack in Beirut was carried out by robots in the middle of rush hour. The attacked building is located in a densely populated area of al-Dahiya (Dahieh) in southern Beirut. According to the IDF, the Hezbollah men had gathered in the basement for a meeting within the elite Radwan force.
Nabih Awada, who teaches at the Lebanese University and has a doctorate in Israeli politics and warfare, places the blame for the escalation on Israel:
– It is heading towards more tensions. It is possible that they enter with ground troops in southern Lebanon in certain areas and in certain places around the border, so that Netanyahu can say that he has achieved his goal of returning the settlers to northern Israel, says Nabih Awada to TV4 Nyheterna.
Assassination in 1983
The IDF claims the meeting was part of planning for a large-scale Hezbollah attack on northern Israel similar to the one carried out by Hamas on October 7 last year, which was the starting point for the Gaza war.
Ibrahim Aqil was subject to sanctions by the United States. The justification for that was that he was accused of connection to, among other things, the bombings against the US Embassy and a US Marine Corps facility in Beirut in 1983, killing 300 people. The reward of the equivalent of SEK 71 million was announced by the US State Department last year.
Aqil is the second really high-ranking Hezbollah commander that Israel has killed in recent strikes. In July, Fuad Shukr was killed in an aerial attack.