The Israel Defense Forces announced on Saturday morning that Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a series of strikes the day prior on a Hezbollah command center in southern Beirut.
The IDF’s operation, which began around 6:30 p.m. local time, targeted a compound in the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahiyeh where Nasrallah was believed to be meeting with senior officials from the U.S.-designated terror group.
Also killed in the strike was senior Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki, who had survived an assassination attempt days before Friday’s operation.
Israeli fighter jets could be heard over Tel Aviv and Haifa into the early morning hours as Israel conducted additional strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
Nasrallah’s assassination comes a week and a half after pagers and walkie-talkies carried by the Iran-backed terror group’s operatives were targeted in a wide-ranging operation that saw simultaneous detonations of the devices on consecutive days, killing several dozen people and injuring thousands.
Nasrallah, who rarely appears in public, had led the terror group since the 1992 assassination of his predecessor, Abbas Al-Musawi, during a time when Hezbollah was tied to attacks around the world, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, in which 29 people were killed, and the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires two years later that killed 85 people. In 2012, Bulgarian officials alleged that the group was behind the bombing of a tourist bus in the resort city of Burgas that killed five Israelis as well as a Bulgarian bus driver.
This story is developing.
