Who was Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah commander with a $7m bounty on his head?

In April 1983, a truck loaded with 2,000lb of explosives sped through the gate to the US embassy in Beirut and detonated as it struck the building.

The blast instantly turned the embassy to rubble and killed 63 people, including 52 American and Lebanese employees.

One of the men behind the attack was Ibrahim Aqil, a top Hezbollah commander with a $7 million US bounty on his head, who has been killed in an Israeli strike on Beirut, according to Israel’s military.

Aqil, who served as head of the militia’s Radwan special forces, was reportedly killed on Friday along with 10 senior commanders of the elite unit in a Hezbollah stronghold in the southern suburbs.

Aqil became second-in-command to Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, after the killing of Fuad Shukr in a separate strike on Beirut earlier this year. His death threatened to escalate tensions between Hezbollah and Israel into a full-blown war.

The new strike – a visible display of both Israel’s intelligence capabilities and capacity to repeatedly target the group’s most senior command – once again reignited fears of a major escalation.

Aqil, who often used aliases and is believed to be in his 60s, sat on Hezbollah’s highest military body, known as the Jihad Council, and was one of the group’s veterans.

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

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.”

The Hezbollah chief “suffered a major blow by losing Fuad Shakr and Ibrahim Aqil in such a short and crucial time when he needs his inner circle”, Dr Valensi explained.

Hezbollah will feel they must respond “dramatically and significantly”.

She added: “This is definitely the ‘new phase in war’ [that] Israeli officials declared this week.”

According to the US state department, Aqil was a “principal member” of the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJU), a Lebanese Shia militia known for its activities in the 1980s during the Lebanese Civil War.

The terror group claimed responsibility for bombings the US Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Among the 63 killed were eight CIA officers, making it the single greatest loss of lives in the agency’s history.

Six months later, the IJU carried out a second suicide bombing on the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American personnel. Seconds later, a second bomber killed 58 French paratroopers and six Lebanese civilians.

Washington accused Aqil of helping to mastermind both attacks, along with the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon.

It listed him as a specially designated global terrorist in 2019, placing the $7 million bounty on his head.

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

Hezbollah was established in the 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.

Its cohort of founding operatives helped turn the group from a small militia into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000.

Friday afternoon’s strike was the third assassination in the Lebanese capital blamed on Israel since October, when Hezbollah began cross-border clashes with the country in support of Hamas over the Gaza war.

Israel announced it was shifting its war objectives to its northern border with Lebanon this week.

Soon after, thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices belonging to Hezbollah fighters simultaneously detonated in twin attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 and wounding over 3,000.

Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, vowed that Israel would face retribution for the blasts.

Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, declared Hezbollah will pay an “increasing price” for attacks in northern Israel.