Hezbollah hits out at report that contact ‘lost’ with Nasrallah’s presumed successor

Despite Hezbollah’s pushback at the reporting, it doesn’t confirm or deny whether contact with Safieddine has been lost.

Unnamed Israeli sources told Sky News Arabia that Safieddine was killed in a heavy airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight Thursday-Friday.

The Israel Defense Forces has announced that the attack in Beirut targeted Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters. The military did not disclose who was at the underground bunker.

Lebanese security sources also told Reuters that Safieddine, widely expected to succeed Nasrallah, has been “unreachable” since the strike targeting an underground bunker in the Lebanese capital.

Three Lebanese security sources told the news agency that Israeli air strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs since Friday have kept rescue workers from searching the site of the raid suspected to have killed Safieddine.

Israel carried out a series of massive air attacks on Thursday and Friday in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, including the international airport’s perimeter.

Israeli media reported that the target of the attacks was Safieddine. The regime has repeatedly attacked southern Beirut neighbourhoods such as Dahiyeh, a stronghold of support for Hezbollah, since it escalated its conflict with the group.

Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 41,800 people, most of them women and children, following an attack by the Palestinian group Hamas last October.

More than 2,000 people have been killed and about 9,500 wounded in Lebanon in almost a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past weeks.

The international community has warned that Israeli attacks in Lebanon could escalate the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war.