Hezbollah confirms death of senior commander in Beirut

On Telegram, the Lebanese group announced that the “mujahid leader” Ibrahim Muhammad Qubaisi “Hajj Abu Musa” was killed on Tuesday.

Hezbollah made no mention of the location or manner of his death, but Israel earlier claimed to have targeted and killed him in a strike on a residential area in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

The strike killed six people in total and wounded at least 15 others, according to the Lebanese government.

The Israeli military claimed that Qubaisi was responsible for recent rocket attacks on Israel.

The assassinations came as part of the Israeli regime’s escalation against Lebanon, which has been targeting the country since October 7, when the regime launched a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

As part of the escalation, the regime carried out extensive airstrikes against southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 569 people, including 50 children and 94 women, and wounding 5,000 others.

The attacks came less than a week after the regime killed 38 people, including three children and seven women as well as Ibrahim Aqil, another one of Hezbollah’s senior commanders, in an attack on a residential building in a southern Beirut suburb.

A couple of days earlier, it had also detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkie radios across the country, killing at least 39 people and wounding 3,000 others.

Hezbollah has been responding to the aggression with numerous operations against the occupied Palestinian territories.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib has voiced disappointment with US President Joe Biden’s remarks about the escalating crisis between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday, but said he still hoped Washington could intervene to help.

Half a million people are estimated to have been displaced in Lebanon, he said. He added Lebanon’s prime minister hoped to meet with US officials over the next two days.

The United States “is the key … to our salvation”, he told an event in New York City hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Top US officials have repeatedly stressed that they do not want to see an all-out war in Lebanon, but have not announced concrete steps towards that goal.