Bombardment targets expected Nasallah successor in Beirut
Israel aimed at Hashim Safieddine, a cousin of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as the war in Lebanon expands.
Israel targeted Hezbollah’s likely successor to slain leader Hassan Nasrallah with heavy airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, as it continues to try to dismantle the Lebanese militant group’s leadership structure.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday defended Iran’s missile attack on Israel this week as “legal and legitimate”.
“The operation of our armed forces a few nights ago was totally legal and legitimate,” he said during a rare Friday prayersermon.
The attempt on Hashim Safieddine was the latest in a series of aggressive Israeli attacks on the group, including an intelligence operation that caused thousands of electronic devices carried by Hezbollah to explode at the same time, an airstrike that killed most of the leadership of the group’s elite Radwan force, and an air campaign that has hit more than 3000 targets across Lebanon.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Safieddine had been killed. Israel on Friday hit Beirut’s southern suburbs with a number of intense airstrikes causing large explosions that levelled several buildings in the Lebanese capital. Swaths of the capital were shaken by the blasts, and large plumes of smoke billowed toward the night sky from raging fires on the ground.
The Israeli military had warned residents overnight to evacuate specific buildings, days after much of the population fled following the massive strike that killed Nasrallah. It wasn’t clear which of the attacks were aimed at Hezbollah leadership.
Safieddine is Nasrallah’s cousin and has long been considered his likely successor. He was born in 1964 and spent years in the top ranks of the Lebanese militant group and was often viewed as Hezbollah’s number two, even if not technically reflected on organisation charts.
Safieddine has led Hezbollah’s executive council, which manages many of the group’s social and political activities, and developed strong ties with Iran, completing religious studies there and maintaining relations with senior Iranian officials. His son is married to the daughter of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military leader who was assassinated in a US drone strike in 2020, say analysts who track the group, including Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at Chatham House.
The US under the Trump administration in 2017 added Safieddine to its specially designated terrorist list.
The Israeli military on Thursday urged civilians in more than 20 towns and villages across southern Lebanon to leave their homes, expanding on its evacuation warnings in the country as it intensifies its campaign to push militant group Hezbollah back from its border. For the first time, some of the areas it identified for evacuation were north of the Litani River, the northern limit of a border zone established by the UN after the 2006 war.
The military called on residents to move north of the Awali River, roughly halfway between the Israeli border and Beirut, for their own safety. It comes after Israel sent troops into Lebanon in a ground operation targeting Hezbollah that began earlier this week.
The evacuation announcement in southern Lebanon, along with a strike in central Beirut near the country’s parliament on Thursday, raised concerns that Israel could widen its campaign, a move that would likely further destabilise Lebanon. Lebanon is scrambling to cope with hundreds of thousands of displaced people after Israel launched 3000 airstrikes in recent weeks.
Hezbollah launched about 230 projectiles toward Israel on Thursday, according to the Israeli military, with some intercepted and others crashing.
The military said it shot down an aerial drone near Tel Aviv after a pair of drones were detected over the Mediterranean near Israel’s largest city. A second drone crashed, the military said.
A strike in Beirut’s Bachoura neighbourhood early Thursday killed at least six people, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Witnesses said there were strikes on two different apartments on the same floor of a building shortly after midnight on Thursday. The Israeli military said that the air force targeted 15 Hezbollah targets in Beirut, including what it said were intelligence operatives and weapons sites.
The Bachoura strike was the second time that Israel had struck within the city limits of the Lebanese capital since it escalated its campaign against Hezbollah and other militant groups in Lebanon. Most of its other airstrikes have targeted the southern suburbs of Beirut, targeting what Israel says are Hezbollah facilities.
The war has displaced more than 340,000 people in Lebanon since last year, according to data from the UN’s migration organisation. Thirty-seven people were killed in attacks across Lebanon on Thursday, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. More than 1000 people were killed in less than two weeks after Israel intensified its campaign against Hezbollah in September, it said.
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