Israel hit Hezbollah’s leader

Israel and the UN Security Mission in Beirut. Blasts from the Hezbollah Headquarters, as reported by the Netanyahu-Busher Buster

Over the course of just 12 days, there were a number of explosions, bomb attacks, and Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Israel, as well as the killing of several other high-ranking Hezbollah officials. More than 30,000 people were wounded and tens of thousands were displaced by these attacks.

The scope of the operation remains unclear, but the officials have said that a ground invasion is a possibility to push the group away from the border. Thousands of troops were moved toward the border.

85,000 people are in public schools and other shelters due to the fighting, according to the UN. Air strikes have forced the cancellation of 20 primary health care centers and the loss of access to clean water for 300,000 people.

Israel’s air forces followed with a new set of strikes early Saturday, also in the southern suburbs, shortly after warning residents of three buildings to evacuate. It said they were being used by Hezbollah to hide weapons.

Israeli army spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the strikes targeted the main Hezbollah headquarters, saying it was located underground beneath residential buildings.

Israel spent a week trying to eliminate Hezbollah’s senior leadership. An assassination attempt on Nasrallah would be a big step forward. The Pentagon said the U.S. had no advance warning of the strikes.

Israel gave no information about the type of bomb or how many it used, but the explosion caused an area greater than a city block. The Israeli army has in its arsenal 2,000-pound, American-made “Bunker Buster” guided bombs designed specifically for hitting subterranean targets.

Rescue workers were able to climb over large slabs of concrete, surrounded by high piles of twisted metal. Several craters were visible, one with a car toppled into it. A stream of residents carrying their belongings were seen fleeing along a main road out of the district.

The airstrikes Friday had leveled several large residential buildings in southern Beirut, which Israeli officials had almost immediately labeled the headquarters of Hezbollah in statements they issued even as the smoke and debris clouds from the explosion rose above the city.

News of the blasts came as Netanyahu was briefing reporters after his U.N. address. A military aide whispered into his ear, and Netanyahu quickly ended the briefing.

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A lot of people are expected to die as teams comb through the rubble. Israel launched a series of strikes on other areas of the southern suburbs following the initial blast.

The Lebanese health ministry announced late Friday that six people had died and more than 90 had been injured by the strikes, but authorities said they were still clearing vast quantities of rubble, meaning those numbers would likely rise.

The Israeli security official thinks the campaign against Hezbollah won’t last long because of the military’s smaller goals.

The people in the crowd waved their fists in the air and shouted, “We will not accept humiliation,” as they went to march behind the coffins.

Hezbollah officials remain defiant. Not long before the explosions Friday evening, thousands gathered in another part of Beirut’s suburbs for the funeral of three Hezbollah members killed in earlier strikes, including the head of the group’s drone unit, Mohammed Surour.

In the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, civil defense workers pulled the bodies of two women — 35-year-old Hiba Ataya and her mother Sabah Olyan — from the rubble of a building brought down by a strike.

In Gaza, Israel aims to dismantle Hamas’ military and political regime, but the goal in Lebanon is to push Hezbollah away from the border — “not a high bar like Gaza” in terms of operational objectives, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to military briefing guidelines.

The mood among Israelis was jubilant. One Tel Aviv apartment building blasted a song with the Hebrew lyrics: “Oh Nasrallah, we’ll take you down, God willing, and send you back to God along with all of Hezbollah.” At a beach in southern Israel a lifeguard announced that the rat had been assassinated over a loudspeaker. The people of Israel live.

The leader of a group that several nations, including the U.S. have labeled a terrorist organization rarely made public appearances.

Hezbollah’s defeat, Israel’s victory, and “the end is coming”: Jerusalem’s top commander, Herzi Halevi, said in a video statement

Israel’s top military commander, Chief of the General Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, issued a video statement Saturday, in which he said the unprecedented strikes Friday that had targeted Hezbollah’s leadership was “not the end” for what he termed Israel’s “toolbox.’

Amer Al Sabaileh, a Jordanian security expert and close observer of Hezbollah, said the fact Nasrallah was willing to take the high risk to his life of gathering with other Hezbollah commanders amid Israel’s campaign indicates the group was in crisis after two weeks of crippling Israeli attacks.

The level of shock among Hezbollah is not something that can be measured. They were not expecting that Israel would initiate and keep attacking Hezbollah.

Sanam Vakil is the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think tank Chatham House.

“Iran will be looking for some way to turn the tables and save some face,” Vakil wrote in a long series of online posts about the killing and its impact on Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups like the Houthis in Yemen. The axis has not proven to be effective in providing Iran deterrence against Israel.

Orna Mizrahi, an Israeli security expert from the Institute for National security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that Israel’s successes in degrading Hezbollah’s leadership structure can be used to force Hezbollah forces back from the border with northern Israel.

Hezbollah’s succession plans and the process by which Nasrallah may be replaced are opaque, but should follow a blueprint that saw his own elevation more than 30 years ago, according to Nick Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and long-time expert of Hezbollah based in Beirut.

The blow to Hezbollah’s confidence is going to be big, but it should be the same as what happened in 1992. Shura Council elects someone else.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in a post on X, said he had spoken with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Saturday. “We agreed on the need for a diplomatic solution to end the bloodshed, which is what the only way to restore security and stability is for Lebanon and Israel,” Lammy said.

The president called Nasrallah’s death a measure of justice for his many victims. He also reiterated full support for “Israel’s right to defend itself against Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any other Iranian-supported terrorist groups.”

The killing of Nasrallah by Israel brought joy and rage across the Middle East while exposing the deep divisions of the region.

In Syria, where Hezbollah has backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s brutal civil war, people in Idlib province celebrated on the streets, Syrian journalist Fared Al Mahlool told NPR. People are happy to hear it. And then… Too many people have been displaced, killed, and lost loved ones because of Nasrallah’s support to the Syrian regime. They took part in destroying several cities and displacing so many people,” he said.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese have fled the country’s southern and eastern regions that have borne repeated Israeli strikes in the past week. And many have also been pouring over the border to neighboring Syria, Syrian journalist Danny Makki told NPR, speaking from the capital Damascus.

Thousands of reserve soldiers have been called up in recent days to the border with Lebanon, as Hezbollah continues to trade rocket fire with Israeli ground forces.

In a statement, Hezbollah said its leader of 32 years had been killed in Lebanon by an Israeli airstrike, and offered its best wishes for others who were killed with him.

Despite his death, it was described that Nasrallah was a martyr who would remain with the idea of line and sacred approach.

In Washington, President Biden in a White House statement said Nasrallah and Hezbollah “were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror.”

To highlight the attack’s potential to ignite an even wider Middle East conflict, the semiofficial Iranian news agency, Mehr, reported that an operational head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan, had also been killed in the strike. Iran has long financed and supported Hezbollah, while also supplying weapons and missile technology to the group.

The attack on Hezbollah’s headquarters took place just after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.N. General Assembly. An Israeli official speaking on condition of anonymity said Netanyahu gave the go-ahead for the strike before his address.

In his first public remarks on Friday’s attack, Netanyahu said the assassination of Nasrallah, who he described as “the architect” of a plan to “annihilate” Israel, was an “essential condition” for Israel to achieve its war goals.

The restrictions on public gatherings were imposed by the Israeli military because it was preparing for possible strikes by Hezbollah or other Iran-supported militias.

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“Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a ‘northern front’ against Israel,” Biden said in a statement.

In a separate statement, Biden noted the operation to take out Nasrallah happened within the wider context of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas has attacked Israel.

As Israeli forces prepared for a response to Hezbollah strikes, the Information Minister of Lebanon stated that negotiations for a ceasefire with Israel were still under way.

Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, in particular, represents another dramatic new development for a conflict that has metastasized across the Middle East region since last October.

The latest exchanges of fire, combined with Israel’s preparations to invade southern Lebanon has mounted fears that the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was heading toward an all-out war.

Meanwhile, the IDF also said it had intercepted eight projectiles launched from Lebanon into Israel on Sunday, hitting open areas near Tiberias in Israel’s north.

In a Telegram statement, the Israel Defense Forces stated that its air force targeted buildings where weapons and military structures of the organization were stored.

Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel sooner than expected after his trip to the United Nations as Israel was rumored to be preparing an invasion into southern Lebanon.

Sirens sound in the northern Israeli city of Haifa and nearby towns. Israel said Haifa was hit for the first time since the war began.

September 27: Netanyahu said at the UN that Israel was winning and would attack Iran and its proxies in the Middle East. Many of the delegates leave the U.N. hall in a public snub at his address, in which he says the UN is an “swamp of antisemitic bile.”

A wave of explosions of communications devices, which included walkie-talkies, killed 14 and wounded 450 in Lebanon, according to health officials. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks about “excellent achievements” by Israel’s military and intelligence branches leading to “impressive results,” but does not mention the device attacks of the previous two days.