Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Israel targeted a senior Hizbollah commander on Friday in an air strike on the group’s stronghold in southern Beirut, escalating hostilities between the two sides and fuelling fears of a full-blown war.
The target was Hizbollah’s operations commander, Ibrahim Aqil, according to people familiar with the matter, who has a $7mn US bounty on his head over his alleged involvement in the 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed hundreds of people.
Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported that an F-35 warplane launched four missiles into the Jamous area of Dahiyeh, striking a residential building. It has not yet been confirmed if Aqil was in the building or among the eight people Lebanese authorities said were killed in the strike.
It capped a week of deadly mass detonations of the Iran-backed militant group’s communications devices that killed 37 people and injured thousands more. Hizbollah has blamed the attacks on Israel, which has not directly commented.
The Israeli strike on Friday is the second targeting a senior Hizbollah commander in southern Beirut since the conflict erupted last October. A July strike on a residential building in Dahiyeh killed Fuad Shukr, Hizbollah’s top military commander.
Aqil, like Shukr, was one of the group’s earliest founding members and sat on Hizbollah’s Jihad Council, the group’s highest military body, according to four people familiar with Hizbollah’s operations.
Aqil, who headed the group’s special operations, is suspected by the US of involvement in attacks 41 years ago in Beirut at the US and French barracks, which killed 307 people, and the US embassy, which killed 63.
Hizbollah did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Aqil. But the strike dealt another humiliating blow to Lebanon’s dominant political and military force, which was still reeling from the mass detonations this week.
At least 59 people were injured in Friday’s strike on Beirut, Lebanon’s ministry of health said. That number was likely to climb as the attack took place during rush hour in a densely packed neighbourhood.
Lebanon’s civil defence authorities said rescue efforts were ongoing, with people still being pulled from the rubble after two residential buildings collapsed.
Footage circulating on social media showed burnt-out cars and large piles of rubble where a building would have stood, indicating a substantial strike. Broadcasting live from the scene, Hizbollah’s Al-Manar TV showed a building with its front facade blown off.
The strike in Beirut came amid intensifying salvos between Israeli forces and Hizbollah, which have been exchanging cross-border fire since Hizbollah started launching rockets at Israel in support of Hamas on October 8, the day after the Palestinian militant group’s attack on Israel.
Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant declared this week that the war between the two foes had entered a “new phase”, adding on Thursday evening that Hizbollah “will pay an increasing price”.
On Thursday night, the Israeli military said that its jets struck around 100 rocket launchers in Lebanon that were due to fire at Israel “in the immediate future”. It was one of Israel’s heaviest rounds of strikes on Lebanon since the start of the war.
On Friday, Hizbollah fired more than 140 rockets at Israeli-controlled territory, according to the Israeli military, sparking fires in several areas. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Following the strike on Beirut, Hizbollah said it had launched more rocket salvos targeting what it said were military installations, including one military intelligence headquarters it said was “responsible for assassinations”.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the US still did not see a wider war as “inevitable”.
“We don’t want to see escalation, we don’t want to see a second front in this war opened up,” Kirby said. “Everything we’re doing is going to be to try to prevent that outcome.”
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who condemned the “criminal” attacks on Lebanon this week, said he had requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. “All the communications I received yesterday from senior international officials confirmed that the Israeli enemy crossed red lines,” he said.
Mikati said he would head to the US for diplomatic talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly “to assert that there is still space available for a diplomatic solution”.
Additional reporting by Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut and Felicia Schwartz in Washington
Read the full article here
