Overnight Saturday, the IDF eliminated a senior commander in Hezbollah’s Badr Unit in a strike in the Deir ez-Zahrani area of southern Lebanon, the military said on Sunday.
It followed a suicide drone attack by Hezbollah that seriously wounded an IDF officer and two soldiers in southern Lebanon.
The Israeli troops had been stationed in the Security Zone in accordance with the framework agreement signed in June with the Lebanese government.
The escalation in Lebanon started at around 2.30 am on Saturday, according to Israel’s Channel 12 broadcaster.
The suicide drone was launched at IDF forces from a brigade operating in the Ali Taher Ridge area in southeastern Lebanon, according to the report.
The wounded officer and soldiers were evacuated to Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa. Two of them are in serious condition and are sedated and on ventilators in the intensive care unit, while the third has stabilised and is now classified as in a moderate condition, Channel 12 reported.
Abu Hassan Alaa, the commander killed by Israel, oversaw numerous assaults on Israeli soldiers operating in the security zone, including drone attacks, according to the IDF.
In recent years, the terrorist “commanded several combat sectors in the Hezbollah terrorist organisation that operated against IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians,” the military said.
“The IDF will not allow the Hezbollah terrorist organisation to harm Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers, and will continue to operate to remove threats,” the military added.
The Israeli military killed another Hezbollah commander the previous night in the Ansar area in southwestern Lebanon.
The IDF identified the operative as Ali Samir al-Haj Hassan, a battalion commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan Force. Several other terrorists were killed in the strike as well, the army said.
Lebanese media said that IDF airstrikes in several locations killed nine people in total, including women and children, according to Ynet.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam hit out at Israel’s retaliatory strikes, claiming on X in Arabic that it “undermines efforts to stabilise the situation in the south.”
He also said the responsibility for dealing with terrorist infrastructure, “if it exists” on the Lebanese side, lay with the Lebanese state.
The IDF in response said that the strike on the Radwan Force commander was specifically directed at Hassan, “who was a lawful target under international law.”
It further emphasised that it targeted him inside a military headquarters. “The terrorist used his family as human shields, hiding alongside them inside the military headquarters,” the army added.
Israel: Negotiations with Beirut must continue urgently
On Saturday night, Israel’s Foreign Ministry criticised the Iranian proxy group’s “cynical tactic” of embedding its military among civilians.
“A Hezbollah commander placed his own family inside the group’s military stronghold, using them as human shields,” the ministry wrote on X.
This use of human shields “must be condemned,” it added.
Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa told reporters in Arabic that while no date for further Israeli-Lebanese negotiations had been set, “they will continue”, reported Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International.
Asked whether Washington supported Israel’s latest round of strikes, Issa replied, “I don’t know. You know more than I do.” Israeli operations in southern Lebanon would stop when Hezbollah lays down its weapons, he continued. “Everything will stop,” he added.
Issa spoke to reporters after meeting Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri in Beirut.
The latest flare-up in Lebanon should “jump-start the talks” with Beirut and “make them much more serious, not do the opposite,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Doron Spielman told AFP.
“And I think it will. It will hopefully move these talks along, because the enemy here is clear and the enemy is Hezbollah,” he added.
Hezbollah ‘places children in harm’s way’
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee hit out at Hezbollah, calling it “pure evil”.
Hezbollah wounds Israeli troops, then “rounds up children” in a military compound knowing that Israel will retaliate because Iran’s proxy group “want[s] them to be in harm’s way,” he said.
He equated Hezbollah’s conduct with that of Hamas.
Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter voiced denounced the Radwan Force commander for using “his own family as human shields inside a Hezbollah military headquarters.”
Leiter stated on X: “If the Lebanese government uses this incident as a pretext to delay or discontinue peace talks, it would hand a tactical victory to the enemies of peace. Derailing the talks is precisely what Hezbollah is trying to achieve.”
Meanwhile on Friday, Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem accused the Lebanese government of subjecting Lebanon’s armed forces to “Israeli pressures” by dispatching it to enforce the trilateral framework signed in June between Beirut and Jerusalem, and brokered by Washington.
“How can you accept this ongoing humiliation of the Lebanese army?” AFP quoted him as saying.
“Where is the patriotism? Where is the dignity of the army that ought to be preserved?” the terror chief asked.
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