Hezbollah said on Monday that one of its commanders was killed in a strike in southern Lebanon, adding to concerns about a wider regional war as Israel battles Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement, Hezbollah identified the commander as Wissam Hassan al-Tawil but gave few additional details. A Lebanese security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said al-Tawil was a commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan unit, which Israel says aims to infiltrate its northern border. The official said he was killed in a strike in Khirbet Selm, a village in southern Lebanon, 14km from the Israeli border.
Israel did not immediately comment on the attack.
A day earlier, the Israeli military said that it had killed at least seven members of Hezbollah in strikes aimed at destroying the Radwan unit and that it was ready to attack more of Hezbollah’s positions. The continued cross-border skirmishes have fuelled concerns about a broader regional war.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzl Halevi, said that its forces were determined to keep pressure on Hezbollah and that if those efforts fell short, Israel was ready to fight “another war”. “We will create a completely different reality, or we will get to another war,” he said on Sunday.
Hezbollah attacks damaged an Israeli military base on Saturday, one of the group’s biggest assaults against Israel in months of back-and-forth strikes across the border. The powerful Lebanese militia has pledged support for Hamas, which is also backed by Iran and has engaged in small-scale attacks on Israel’s border since the war began three months ago. In recent days, it has stepped up assaults on Israel in response to the killing last week of a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon.
The rocket fire on the base, the Northern Air Control Unit on Mount Meron, left it with significant damage, according to accounts in the Israeli news media.
New York Times News Service and AP/PTI