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Israel has targeted a Hizbollah commander in a strike on southern Beirut, saying the operation was retaliation against the individual responsible for a deadly rocket attack on the occupied Golan Heights at the weekend.
A large explosion ripped through the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs on Tuesday evening, with footage from the scene showing several floors of a residential building collapsed and large plumes of smoke rising above it. The area of Beirut is a Hizbollah stronghold.
The Israeli strike 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 conflict.
The critical question will be how the Iranian-backed militant group, which is considered one of the world’s most heavily armed non-state actors, responds.
The IDF said that it had targeted the commander behind last week’s strike on Majdal Shams, which was the deadliest incident for civilians in Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hizbollah started exchanging fire nine months ago after Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant said that Hizbollah had “crossed the red line” with the strike, which killed 12 youngsters on a football pitch in the town. Hizbollah denied responsibility, but had been firing at Israel earlier in the day.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said on Tuesday evening that the Israeli strike had targeted the area around Hizbollah’s Shura Council in the Haret Hreik neighbourhood.
Large crowds gathered at the scene following the attack, as the injured were still being cleared from the building and its immediate surroundings.
Fears of an escalation had been heightened earlier on Tuesday, when an Israeli civilian was killed in a separate rocket attack in HaGoshrim, a kibbutz a few kilometres from the Israeli border with Lebanon.
The Israeli military on Tuesday said that about 10 rockets had “crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory”, and that while most were intercepted, one had struck a kibbutz, causing the casualty.
Another person was wounded in a subsequent drone attack from Lebanon, local 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.
The militant group earlier said it had fired at Israeli fighter jets that broke the sound barrier in Lebanese air space, forcing the planes to turn around. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
The months-long hostilities between Israel and Hizbollah have caused casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border.
But they had been mostly contained to the border region, with neither side apparently wanting to escalate to all-out war.
It is the first time Israel has targeted a Hizbollah member in Beirut since the hostilities erupted in October.
This is a developing story
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