Israel has killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of its top commanders in a series of targeted air strikes on the Iran-backed movement’s stronghold in Beirut.
Here is what we know about the slain commanders.
On Friday, an Israeli air strike on the Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut killed Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader for 32 years.
His death was confirmed a day later by Hezbollah.
Despite leading a life in hiding to avoid assassination, the 64-year-old Nasrallah had wielded great power in Lebanon.
He also enjoyed cult status among his Shiite Muslim supporters, although he was rarely seen in public for security reasons.
“The point of security measures is that movement be kept secret, but that doesn’t stop me from moving around and seeing what is happening,” Nasrallah told Lebanon’s pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar newspaper in a 2004 interview.
Nasrallah was elected secretary-general of Hezbollah in 1992, aged just 32, after an Israeli helicopter gunship killed his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi.
Israel said on Saturday that Nasrallah was one of its “greatest enemies”, and that his death made the world “a safer place”.
A strike on July 30 killed Fuad Shukr, one of the group’s top military commander.
Shukr, who was in his early 60s, played a key role in cross-border drone and rocket attacks on Israeli forces, according to a source close to Hezbollah.
The two sides have traded near-daily fire across the frontier since Hezbollah ally Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel.
Shukr helped found Hezbollah during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war and became a key adviser to Nasrallah.
Shukr was Hezbollah’s most senior military commander, and the leader said he had been in daily contact with him since October.
Israel blamed Shukr for a July rocket attack on the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights that killed 12 children in a Druze Arab town. Hezbollah denied responsibility.
In 2017, the US Treasury offered a $5 million reward for information on Shukr, saying he had “a central role” in the deadly 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
A strike on September 20 killed Ibrahim Aqil, head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, along with 15 other commanders.
According to Lebanese officials, the attack killed a total of 55 people, many of them civilians.
A source close to Hezbollah described Aqil as the second-in-command in the group’s forces after Shukr.
The Radwan Force is Hezbollah’s most formidable offensive unit and its fighters are trained in cross-border infiltration, a source close to the group told AFP.
The United States said Aqil was a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, the movement’s highest military body.
The US Treasury said he was a “principal member” of the Islamic Jihad Organisation — a Hezbollah-linked group behind the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and an attack on the US Marine Corps barracks in the Lebanese capital the same year that killed 241 US soldiers.
On September 25, a strike killed Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, who commanded several military units including a guided missiles unit.
“Kobeissi was an important source of knowledge in the field of missiles and had close ties with senior Hezbollah military leaders,” the Israeli military said.
Kobeissi joined Hezbollah in 1982 and rose through the ranks of the group’s forces.
One of the units he led was tasked with manning operations in part of the south of Lebanon, which borders Israel.
A strike on September 26 killed Mohammed Srur, the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit since 2020.
Srur studied mathematics and was among a number of top advisers sent by Hezbollah to Yemen to train the country’s Huthi rebels, who are also backed by Iran, a source close to Hezbollah said.
He had also played a key role in Hezbollah’s intervention since 2013 in Syria’s civil war in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Other commanders killed in recent strikes include Muhammad Ali Ismail, Ali Karake, Wissam Tawil and Mohammed Naameh Nasser.
