Israel killed a high Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, the Israeli military and two security sources in Lebanon said, sharply escalating the year-prolonged war between Israel and the Iran-backed team of workers.
The Israeli military said the slain Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqil, who served on Hezbollah’s high military body, became the appearing commander of the team of workers’s elite Radwan power and that he became killed alongside with different senior commanders of the unit.
The news agency moreover reported that Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed bigger than 300 folks on the American embassy and a US Marines barracks.
Aqil, who has moreover historical the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, became the second member of Hezbollah’s high military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the identical condominium centered Fuad Shukr in July.
Israel escalated its assaults on the team of workers this week after months of border struggling with attributable to the war in Gaza that started on Oct. 7 with a lethal raid and hostage-taking in Israel by Hezbollah’s Palestinian ally Hamas.
Like Shukr, Aqil is a outmoded of Hezbollah, which became founded by Iran’s Progressive Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.
Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley sometime round 1960, Aqil had joined different mighty Lebanese Shi’ite political stream, Amal, earlier than switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, in step with a security provide.
The United States accuses him of a feature in the Beirut truck bombings on the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 folks, and a U.S. Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 folks.
It extra accused him of directing the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, striking a $7 million bounty on his head.
Regarding the bombing of the US Marine barracks and different assaults on Western pursuits in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were implemented by diminutive teams not linked to Hezbollah.
Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped flip the team of workers from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s most valuable military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and struggling with it again in 2006.
When Shukr became killed in July, it became viewed as the heaviest blow to its inform structure for the reason that 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander nonetheless by Israel and the US as a terrorist.
Aqil, whose bounty became feature by the US at an finest bigger price than that of Shukr’s, may per chance say a the same blow.
