Death toll from Israeli strike on Hezbollah military leaders rises
Summary
The militant group said 16 of its members were killed in Friday’s attack in Beirut, which Lebanon’s health minister said left a total of 31 people dead.BEIRUT—Israel’s airstrike on a building in southern Beirut didn’t just kill a top Hezbollah commander—it took out an entire class of senior leaders of the militant group’s most elite fighting force, as the two foes lurch closer to all-out war.
Hezbollah on Saturday raised the death toll among its fighters from Friday’s airstrike to 16, including top military commander Ibrahim Aqil and many of the senior commanders of the elite Radwan force. The strike on top leadership followed a pair of broad attacks on the group’s rank and file, when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been rigged with explosives blew up roughly simultaneously across the country.
According to the group’s own death announcements, the week’s attacks accounted for about 10% of the 500 Hezbollah fighters to have been killed since the group started firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, said Israel’s string of attacks is aimed at killing the militants who underpin Hezbollah’s ability to fight a war.
“They’re looking to take out people who matter," he said. “So this is calculated."
The week has taken an enormous toll. Lebanon’s minister of health said Saturday that doctors had performed more than 2,000 surgeries on people injured in the attacks, primarily from the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah members. Friday’s airstrike left 31 dead, including women and children, he said. The total includes the fighters. More than a dozen people were still missing Saturday morning, municipal official Ali al-Haraka said at the blast site.
The attacks have also sharpened the already high levels of concern that Israel and Hezbollah were spiraling toward a wider war. Top U.S. military officials are increasingly worried that Israel could launch a major offensive in Lebanon.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled plans for a trip beginning this weekend to Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon announced Friday that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman would head to the eastern Mediterranean on Monday amid the rising tensions. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group is already in the region.
Many of Washington’s closest Arab allies and partners in the Middle East fear a possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon, according to Arab officials, who said it could trigger unrest across the region and an opportunity for extremist groups to harness that anger and regroup.
The Radwan force has trained for infiltration operations and gives Hezbollah additional offensive capabilities, making it a major target for Israel.
Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, said Aqil was one of the early military founders of Hezbollah with roots in other militant groups allegedly responsible for suicide bombings and attacks dating back four decades. The U.S. has linked him to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut and the kidnapping of Americans in the 1980s.
About 25 years ago, Aqil survived an Israeli helicopter attack on his car as he drove through southern Lebanon. This time, Israel attacked Aqil and the other senior commanders with four blasts, one of which destroyed a neighboring nine-story apartment building while the other three came in at angles and hit the basement where the group was meeting, municipal official al-Haraka said.
The street where the attack occurred is lined with low-rise residential buildings and home to businesses including a money-transfer service, a chicken restaurant, a pharmacy and a barber shop. The area had been cordoned off by Hezbollah and Lebanon’s army, and emergency responders were pulling limbs out of the rubble and repairing downed electrical lines.
Hezbollah is now struggling to recover from a week of heavy blows and plug deep security breaches, while restoring morale and order among its cadres. It also faces the prospect of further strikes as Israel steps up its military pressure and shifts its focus from Gaza to the north.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant warned late Thursday that “the sequence of military actions will continue."
Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com
