Israel targets senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut air strike

An Israeli air strike targeted a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Tuesday in what the Israeli military said was retaliation for a cross-border rocket attack three days before that killed 12 children and teenagers.

The head of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah’s operations centre Muhsin Shukr survived an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut aimed at killing him on Tuesday, two senior security sources told Reuters.

A loud blast was heard and a plume of smoke could be seen rising above the southern suburbs – a stronghold of the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah – at around 1640GMT, a Reuters witness said.

A senior Lebanese security source said a senior Hezbollah commander had been the target of the air strike and his fate remained unclear.

Lebanon’s state-run national news agency said an Israeli air strike had targeted the area around Hezbollah’s Shura Council in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood of the capital.

Beirut has been on edge for days ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack in reprisal for the rocket strike on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday that killed the 12 youngsters in a football field in a Druze village.

Hezbollah has denied involvement in that attack.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it had conducted “a targeted strike in Beirut on the commander responsible for the murder of the children in Majdal Shams and the killing of numerous additional Israeli civilians”.

Earlier on Tuesday, more rocket fire from south Lebanon killed a civilian in a kibbutz in northern Israel, medics said.

Shortly before the explosion in south Beirut, the Israeli military said 15 projectiles had been fired across the Lebanese border within the past few hours, with impacts in parts of the Upper Galilee region. No injuries were reported.

Israel’s air force had just hit a Hezbollah observation post and “terror infrastructure” in south Lebanon, it added.