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Israel’s military carried out one of its heaviest bombardments of Beirut overnight with multiple air strikes that aimed to kill surviving leaders of militant group Hizbollah.
Residents across the Lebanese capital heard several large blasts, and flames and large plumes of smoke were seen rising from the southern suburb of Dahiyeh in the early hours of Friday.
Hashem Safieddine, the heir apparent to Hizbollah’s assassinated former leader Hassan Nasrallah, was the target, a person familiar with the situation said on Friday.
Israeli military intelligence believed they had located Safieddine attempting to hold a meeting with a small number of other Hizbollah operatives, many of them relatively senior in the organisation, the person said.
It was not immediately clear whether the air strikes had succeeded in killing Safieddine, a fellow cleric and cousin of Nasrallah, who is thought to have been groomed for the top job in recent years. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
Hours later, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei defended this week’s missile assault by the Islamic republic on Israel, as he delivered a sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time in almost five years.
“What [Iran’s] military forces did was the least punishment for the occupying Zionist regime for its shocking crimes,” he told worshippers, amid chants of “death to Israel”.
He also called Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which Israeli authorities said killed 1,200 people, “legitimate”.
Khamenei added that Iran “will fulfil all duties with power and steadfastness, without any hesitation or haste . . . It has been done before and will be done again in the future if need be.”
Friday’s strikes appeared on a similar scale to the waves of those that flattened residential buildings in Dahiyeh last week, killing Nasrallah.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since last October, the majority in the past two weeks, Lebanon’s health minister said. More than 1.2mn people have been displaced, triggering one of the worst crises for the country in decades.
At least 37 people were killed and 151 more were wounded in Israeli attacks across the country in the past 24 hours, Lebanon’s health ministry said late on Thursday.
On Friday, the Israel Defense Forces said they had killed Mohammad Rashid Sakafi, head of Hizbollah’s communication networks, in strike the previous day in the Beirut area.
An Israeli air strike in the early hours of Friday near a border crossing between Lebanon and Syria cut off the main road used by hundreds of thousands of people to flee Israel’s bombardment, Ali Hamieh, the Lebanese transport minister, said on Hizbollah-affiliated Manar TV.
Avichay Adraee, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, had said on X on Thursday that Hizbollah was using the civilian crossing to transport weapons from Syria after Israel targeted other smuggling routes.
In a further sign of the expansion of Israel’s offensive, its military on Friday ordered the evacuation of 17 villages in southern Lebanon and told residents to move north of the Awali river, which in some places runs 60km north of Lebanon’s border with Israel. It brought the number of villages under such orders to 87.
Israel’s offensive in Lebanon against Hizbollah, which is backed by Iran, has raised concerns of a spiralling conflict in the Middle East. Iran said its missile barrage against Israel this week was in retaliation for the assassination of Nasrallah, one of Tehran’s closest allies, and other militant leaders. The attack drew threats of retaliation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi landed in Beirut on Friday, a surprise visit that a ministry spokesperson said was intended to show solidarity with Lebanon and to deliver food and medicine.
Israel has also intensified raids in the occupied West Bank in recent weeks and on Thursday carried out an air strike in Tulkarem that the Palestinian health ministry said had killed at least 18 people, in one of the deadliest strikes in the territory since the start of the war. Israel said it had targeted Hamas’s leader in the city, Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi.
Hizbollah also said it had repelled several land operations by Israeli troops, including with ambushes and in direct clashes.
In a statement on Thursday evening, the G7 said it was “deeply concerned about the situation in Lebanon” and called for “a cessation of hostilities as soon as possible to create space for a diplomatic solution” and for “all actors to protect civilian populations”.
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