Hezbollah second-in-command killed by Israeli air strike in Beirut

Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah’s special forces and up to ten other senior commanders in a Beirut air strike on Friday.

IDF fighter jets struck a multi-storey building in the south of the Lebanese capital, killing Ibrahim Aqil, who ran Hezbollah’s Ridwan unit, during a meeting with his top lieutenants.

Aqil, a career terrorist and close confidant of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, had a $7 million bounty on his head for his role in the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in 1983 which killed 63 people.

He was also involved in the twin bombing attacks on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon the same year which killed 241 US personnel and 307 people in total.

The air strike on Friday, the first time Israel has used fighter jets to assassinate Hezbollah figures hiding out in Beirut, marked another escalation in a conflict teetering on the brink of all-out war.

There were chaotic scenes in Hezbollah’s Dahiya stronghold in southern Beirut as people sifted through the rubble of a collapsed building searching for survivors.

One man who was riding a motorcycle down Jamous Street, a shop-lined thoroughfare near the scene of the attack, witnessed the immediate aftermath of the strike.

“I heard planes in the sky before the explosions,” said the man, who asked not to be identified.

“It wasn’t a drone as some are saying. There were a total of four explosions. It was very hard to see what was going on because there was so much smoke.

“Immediately people started to close the road. Some people got off their motorcycles and rushed in to help and I saw them bringing several wounded people out.”

A woman living on the sixth floor of the apartment block hit in the air strike described how the windows and doors of her flat were blown out by the blast.

“Everything was shattered,” she told The Telegraph.

A senior Israeli official told the Axios news site that “the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s Radwan force was eliminated in the strike”.

The Lebanese health ministry said 12 people were killed and 66 wounded.

Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman, said the Hezbollah commanders had gathered underground beneath a residential building “using civilians as a human shield”.

They were planning an attack in which they “intended to infiltrate and conquer Israeli communities and murder innocent civilians”, Mr Hagari said.

Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, echoed his subordinate’s claim, saying the men had been planning an “October 7” on the northern border for years.

Aqil was considered the second highest-ranking member of Hezbollah after its leader Nasrallah.

In a speech on Thursday, Nasrallah had taunted Israel for missing the terrorist group’s most senior commanders in earlier pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

However, according to reports, Aqil had been wounded in the blasts and was only discharged from hospital on Friday morning.

The Israeli strike is the latest in a series of targeted assassinations of senior Hezbollah operatives and other members of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” across the Middle East.

It is the third time Israel has directed lethal air strikes on the Lebanese capital since Hezbollah began attacking Israel in support of Hamas on Oct 8.

“Aqil was a very significant figure in Hezbollah, his contributions have helped shape the group’s security and military strategies,” Dr Carmit Valensi, head of Syria and Lebanon research at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv told The Telegraph.

His experience and loyalty to Nasrallah made him “indispensable” to the group’s decision-making and operational integrity, she said. “He was less visible than other top figures, but no less crucial.”

Dr Valensi explained that Nasrallah had “suffered a major blow by losing Fuad Shakr and Ibrahim Aqil in such a short and crucial time when he needs his inner circle. Hezbollah will feel they must respond dramatically and significantly”.

Iran’s embassy in Beirut issued a statement saying that “Israel’s madness has crossed all lines” in the wake of the latest strike.

On Thursday, Hezbollah launched 140 rockets at northern Israel and the Golan Heights, damaging property and sparking large bushfires.

Its aggression means that 60,000 Israelis in the north are unable to return to their homes and some 3 per cent of the country’s most fertile land mass remains empty.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister. has promised a “new phase of the war” but it remains unclear if this will be limited to air strikes or involve a land invasion.

Retired Brigadier General Assaf Orion, a fellow at the Washington Institute and former head of the IDF’s strategy division, said it was unclear how things would unfold.

“My understanding is that we’re currently trying ‘armed persuasion’ to compel Lebanese Hezbollah to stop its attacks on us, raising the cost and implying more to come. So far they are doubling down,” he said.

Hezbollah took responsibility for another rocket barrage at northern Israel shortly after the attack in Beirut on Friday.

Joe Biden, the US president, said that he was working to end the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and to “make sure that the people in northern Israel as well as southern Lebanon are able to go back to their homes, to go back safely”.

“We’re going to keep at it until we get it done, but we’ve got a way to go,” Mr Biden added.

The woman in the building at the time of the blast who spoke to The Telegraph said she was sitting at home with her 20-year-old daughter and waiting for her two younger children to return from school when she heard a blast.

“At first I thought it was in the building behind us, not ours” she said. “But moments later there was another huge explosion and all our windows and even the doors blew off.”

“Everything was shattered. I think we were in shock because instead of leaving immediately, we started to pack our things.

“But then, a few minutes later, some ambulance workers came into the house and yelled at us to get out because they were afraid the whole building would collapse.”

She added: “The ambulance men led us down the stairs and when we got to the third floor we saw there was no more building – just a huge crater. The entire first, second and third floors almost up to the staircase had just disappeared.

“We came outside the building. It was very chaotic. A lot of wounded people were being treated. I stood on the street looking at my building and just prayed for a minute.”

The reported killing of Aqil marks a return to a more conventional form of Israeli military action after this week’s double wave of synchronised sabotage attacks on the movement’s hand-held devices.

The UN Security Council was set to meet on Friday night to discuss the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, called on the council to condemn Hezbollah and Iran in “full force, and designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation”.

According to security sources, Aqil, also known as Tahsin, sat on Hezbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council, and had been responsible for terrorist activities for more than 40 years.

According to the US State Department, he was a “principal member” of the Islamic Jihad Organization, a Lebanese Shia militia known for its activities in the 1980s during the Lebanese Civil War before joining Hezbollah.

Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley sometime around 1960, Aqil had joined Amal, the other big Lebanese Shi’ite political movement, before switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, according to a security source.

Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a small, murky militia into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and fighting it again in 2006.