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Israel has targeted a senior Hizbollah figure in an air strike on Beirut, saying the operation was retaliation against the individual responsible for a deadly rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
A large explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs on Tuesday evening, with footage showing several floors of a residential building badly damaged and large plumes of smoke rising from it. This area of Beirut is a Hizbollah stronghold.
The Israeli strike targeted Fuad Shukr, who is believed to be close to Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group. It was not immediately clear if he was in the residential building, or whether he was killed or wounded in the attack.
It comes amid mounting fears that intensifying clashes between Israel and Hizbollah could trigger a full-blown war despite a flurry of US-led diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation.
Tuesday evening’s strike marks the first time Israel has targeted a Hizbollah figure in Beirut since hostilities erupted in October after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched its attack on the Jewish state.
The Israel Defense Forces said it had targeted the commander behind last Saturday’s strike on Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which was the deadliest incident for civilians in Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hizbollah started exchanging almost daily fire nearly 10 months ago.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said Hizbollah had “crossed the red line” with the strike, which killed 12 youngsters on a football pitch in the town. Hizbollah denied responsibility.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the Israeli strike on Tuesday evening, carried out with a drone that launched three rockets, had targeted the area around Hizbollah’s governing Shura Council in the densely populated Haret Hreik neighbourhood in Beirut.
The agency said one woman was killed and several others wounded, some of them seriously, in the attack.
Large crowds gathered at the scene as the injured were cleared from the residential building and its immediate surroundings.
Washington has described Shukr as a senior adviser to Nasrallah on military affairs and a member of Hizbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council. The US placed Shukr on its specially designated global terrorist list in 2019.
The critical question will be how Hizbollah, which is considered one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors, responds to the Israeli strike.
Hizbollah has previously warned Israel against “any assassination on Lebanese soil against a Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian or Palestinian”, suggesting this would be met with a decisive response.
The hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah have resulted in casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanon border.
But they had been mostly contained to the border region, with neither side apparently wanting to escalate to all-out war.
Speaking in the aftermath of the Israeli strike, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration was pushing for a diplomatic solution to bring an end to the hostilities.
“We do not believe that an all-out war is inevitable and we believe it can still be avoided,” she added.
Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the Israeli attack as “a blatant violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as a grave breach of international laws”.
Fears of an escalation had been heightened earlier on Tuesday when an Israeli civilian was killed in a rocket attack in HaGoshrim, a kibbutz a few kilometres from the Israeli border with Lebanon.
The Israeli military said about 10 rockets had “crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory”, and that while most were intercepted, one had struck a kibbutz, resulting in the death.
Another person was wounded in a subsequent drone attack from Lebanon, Israeli authorities said.
Hizbollah said it had launched two salvos of Katyusha rockets at the nearby Beit Hillel barracks, “in response to” an Israeli strike on the town of Jibchit in Lebanon.
The group also said it had fired at Israeli fighter jets that broke the sound barrier in Lebanese air space, forcing the aircraft to turn around. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Felicia Schwartz in Washington
Cartography by Aditi Bhandari