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.

“These numbers have been partially acknowledged by the enemy, and the coming days will reveal what they have hidden from their audience,” the Lebanese group wrote on Telegram.

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 victims, most of them women and children, following an attack by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, last October.

At least 2,000 victims have since been killed from Israeli attacks, over 9,500 injured and 1.2 million displaced in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that the army has managed to destroy a large part of Hezbollah’s arsenal and to turn the tide of the war.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari also claimed Israeli forces have so far destroyed more than 2,000 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon — including weapons, military buildings and underground infrastructures — according to the spokesperson for Israel’s military,

Hagari said Hezbollah had “invested many efforts and resources to locate its military means under the ground and inside civilian buildings in villages adjacent to the border. Now, we are fiercely operating to dismantle those”.

He added some Hezbollah operatives had been killed in close-quarters combat, and asserted that some 440 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in ground combat or from the air, including about 30 commanders of various ranks.

Hagari claimed that Hezbollah’s chain of command had been “severely hit … (and) this is painful to the Iranian leadership”.