Damaged cars at the site of Friday’s Israeli strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs, on September 21, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has risen to 31, including seven women and three children, Lebanon’s Health Minister said on Saturday (September 21, 2024).

Firass Abiad told reporters 68 people were also wounded of whom 15 remain in hospital, adding that search and rescue operations were still ongoing, with the number of casualties likely to rise.

The rare strike — the deadliest targeting the Lebanese capital since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war — hit a densely populated southern neighbourhood on Friday (September 20, 2024) afternoon during rush hour as people returned home. Israel said it killed 11 Hezbollah operatives, including Ibrahim Aqil who was in charge of the group’s elite Radwan Force. The militant group members were in a meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed.

Hezbollah announced overnight Friday (September 20, 2024) that 15 of its operatives were killed by Israeli forces, but did not elaborate on the location of these deaths.

Lebanese troops cordoned off the area preventing people from reaching the building that was knocked down as members of the Lebanese Red Cross stood nearby to take any recovered body from under the rubble. On Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene of the airstrike where workers were still digging through the rubble.

The Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamie told reporters at the scene that 23 people are still missing.

The airstrike on the crowded Qaim street knocked out an eight-story building that had 16 apartments and damaged another one adjacent to it. The missiles destroyed the first building and cut through the basement of the second where the meeting of Hezbollah officials was being held, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.

In a nearby building, shops were badly damaged including one that sold clothes and had a sign in English that read: “DRESS LIKE YOU’RE ALREADY FAMOUS.” Friday’s deadly strike came hours after Hezbollah launched one of its most intense bombardments of northern Israel in nearly a year of fighting, largely targeting Israeli military sites. Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepted most of the Katyusha rockets.

The militant group said its latest wave of rocket salvos was a response to past Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon. However, it came days after mass explosions of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies killed at least 37 people — including two children. Some 2,900 others were wounded in the assault which has been widely attributed to Israel.

The Lebanese Health Minister said on Saturday (September 21, 2024) hospitals across the country were filled with the wounded.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the attack which marked a major escalation in the past 11 months of simmering conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire regularly since Hamas’ Oct 7 assault on southern Israel ignited the Israeli military’s devastating offensive in Gaza. But previous cross-border attacks have largely struck areas in northern Israel that had been evacuated and less-populated parts of southern Lebanon.

Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet said stopping Hezbollah’s attacks in the country’s north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal, as it considers a wider military operation in Lebanon that could spark an all-out conflict. Israel has since sent a powerful fighting force to the northern border.

The tit-for-tat strikes have forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

Five health workers killed in Gaza

The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that five of its workers were killed, and five others injured, by Israeli fire that struck the ministry’s warehouses in the southern Musbah area.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has already killed at least 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians. (AP) SCY SCY

Beirut:

Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a U.S. Marines barracks.

Two security sources in Lebanon confirmed the veteran fighter was killed in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs during a meeting of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group.

Aqil, who has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah’s top military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July.

Israel escalated its attacks on the group this week after months of border fighting triggered by the conflict in Gaza that began on Oct. 7 with a deadly raid and hostage-taking in Israel by Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally Hamas.

Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.

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

The United States accuses him of a role in the Beirut truck bombings at the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a U.S. Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people.

It further accused him of directing the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, putting the $7 million bounty on his head.

Referring to the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.

Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a shadowy 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.

When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the heaviest blow to its command structure since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander but by Israel and the United States as a terrorist.

Aqil, whose bounty was set by the United States at an even higher value than that of Shukr’s, may prove a similar blow.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)