Israel says it has killed another senior Hezbollah official

The Israel military, the Defense Forces (IDF) said Sunday that it killed another high-ranking Hezbollah official in an airstrike as the Lebanese militant group was reeling from a string of devastating blows and the killing of its overall leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The IDF described Kaouk as the commander of Hezbollah’s preventative security unit and as a member of the Lebanese militia’s executive council. He had been “eliminated in a precise IDF strike,” it said in a post on X.

The military said Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s Central Council, was killed on Saturday. There was no immediate comment from Hezbollah, and it was unknown where the strike occurred.

Several senior Hezbollah commanders have been killed in Israeli strikes in recent weeks, including founding members of the group who had evaded death or detention for decades and were close to Nasrallah himself.

Hezbollah has also been targeted by a sophisticated attack on its pagers and walkie-talkies that was widely blamed on Israel. A wave of Israeli airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon has killed at least 1,030 people — including 156 women and 87 children — in less than two weeks, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven from their homes in Lebanon by the latest strikes. The government estimates that around 250,000 are in shelters, with three to four times as many staying with friends or relatives, or camping out on the streets, Environment Minister Nasser Yassin told The Associated Press.

Hezbollah has continued to fire rockets and missiles into northern Israel, but most have been intercepted or fallen in open areas, causing few casualties and only scattered damage.

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Kaouk was a veteran member of Hezbollah going back to the 1980s and served as Hezbollah’s military commander in southern Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. He often appeared in local media, where he would comment on politics and security developments, and he gave eulogies at the funerals of senior militants. The United States had announced sanctions against him in 2020.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Hezbollah and Hamas are allies that consider themselves part of an Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” against Israel.

Israel has responded with waves of airstrikes, and the conflict has steadily ratcheted up to the brink of all-out war, raising fears of a region-wide conflagration.

Israel says it is determined to return some 60,000 of its citizens to communities in the north that were evacuated nearly a year ago. Hezbollah has said it will only halt its rocket fire if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, which has proven elusive despite months of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas led by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah, enjoying cult status among his Shiite Muslim supporters.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said: “His elimination makes the world a safer place.”

But Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref denounced the “unjust bloodshed” and threatened that Nasrallah’s killing would bring about Israel’s “destruction.”

Hamas condemned Nasrallah’s killing as a “cowardly terrorist act.”

Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Syria all declared public mourning. At the same time, Yemen’s Huthi rebels said they fired a missile at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Saturday, hoping to hit it as Netanyahu returned from a trip to New York.

U.S. President Joe Biden — whose government is Israel’s top arms supplier — said it was a “measure of justice,” while Kamala Harris, who is running to replace him in the White House, called Nasrallah “a terrorist with American blood on his hands.”

Iran called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council in protest at Nasrallah’s killing.

In the letter, Iran’s U.N. envoy, Amir Saeid Iravani, called on the Security Council to “take immediate and decisive action to stop Israel’s ongoing aggression” and prevent it “from dragging the region into full-scale war.”

Analysts told AFP that Nasrallah’s death leaves Hezbollah under pressure to deliver a response.

“Either we see an unprecedented reaction by Hezbollah … or this is total defeat,” said Heiko Wimmen of the International Crisis Group think tank.

Mass displacement

More than 700 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to health ministry figures, since the bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds began earlier this month.

Strikes on Saturday killed 33 people and wounded 195, the ministry said.

Most of the deaths in Lebanon came on Monday, the deadliest day of violence since the country’s 1975-90 civil war.

U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi said “Well over 200,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon” and more than 50,000 have fled to neighbouring Syria.

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Hundreds of families spent the night into Saturday outside as air strikes pounded south Beirut.

“I didn’t even pack any clothes, I never thought we would leave like this and suddenly find ourselves on the streets,” South Beirut resident Rihab Naseef, 56, told AFP.

Meanwhile, air strikes of unknown origin in eastern Syria killed 12 pro-Iran fighters and wounded a large number of people, a war monitor said Sunday.

Israel says it has killed another senior Hezbollah official, the strikes, in and around the city of Deir Ezzor and near the border with Iraq, were not immediately claimed but had targeted military positions, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Israel to ‘remove this threat’

Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting until the border with Lebanon is secured.

“Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their homes safely,” he said.

Diplomats have said efforts to end the war in Gaza were key to halting the fighting in Lebanon and bringing the region back from the brink.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,586 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The U.N. has described the statistics as reliable.