In yet another devastating strike on Hezbollah, Israeli officials said an Israeli airstrike on Sept. 20 killed its operations commander and a dozen other top leaders as they met in a bunker beneath a residential building outside Beirut, Lebanon.
Hezbollah had responded overnight, as it promised it would, to this week’s deadly exploding pager and radio attacks, launching nearly 150 rockets at Israel.
Israeli officials have not directly commented on the attacks and have not said whether Israel’s military was involved.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed Ibrahim Aqil was killed in the Sept. 20 airstrike.
Aqil was Hezbollah’s operations commander, head of its elite Radwan Forces, in line to become second-in-command to leader Hassan Nasrallah, and long wanted by the United States for his directing the 1983 U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks bombings in Beirut.
About 10 senior operations and Radwan commanders were also killed in the bombing strike, the IDF said.
Hezbollah Pager Explosions
Earlier in the week, Hezbollah pagers, and in a second wave handheld radios, exploded on their users’ belts or in their hands, killing nine and wounding more than 2,800.Hezbollah’s rocket attack was one of its largest ever. The IDF, which tends to minimize damage reports, said that some of the rockets were shot down while many others landed in open areas. Some of those set fires and few Israeli casualties were reported.
The IDF said about 120 rockets were fired at the Golan Heights, Safed, and Upper Galilee, and another 20 at the areas of Meron and Netua.
Israeli press reports, though, said around 50 houses in Israel’s northernmost community, Metula, were damaged by rockets in the overnight barrage. Over 300 houses, around half of all homes, have been damaged since Oct. 8, 2023. Many homes back up to the Lebanese border.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said that eight had been killed and 59 wounded in Friday’s attacks.
The Israeli air force took out more than a hundred rocket launchers in southern Lebanon on Thursday, the IDF said.
IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the Hezbollah leaders were hit while in a meeting underneath a residential building in Dahieh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in a suburb south of Beirut.
Aqil and the Radwan commanders were planning Hezbollah’s “Conquer the Galilee” attack plan in which Hezbollah intended to infiltrate Israeli communities and murder innocent civilians, the IDF said.
“The Hezbollah commanders we eliminated today had been planning their ‘October 7th’ on the northern border for years. We reached them, and we will reach anyone who threatens the security of Israel’s citizens,” IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said in a press release.
Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack last year, in which it killed 1,200 people, wounded thousands, and kidnapped 250 more, was modeled on Hezbollah’s plan, Sarit Zahavi, an Israeli strategic analyst specializing in Israel’s northern front, told The Epoch Times.
Aqil had a long history of terrorism going back more than 40 years. He directed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy, which killed 63 people, and the Marine barracks bombing that year, which killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and 3 soldiers. It was the Marine Corps’ worst single-day loss of life since the World War II battle of Iwo Jima.
A blast of another barracks at the same time killed 58 French paratroops.
Aqil, also known as Tahsin, was then a top member of an Islamic Jihad terror cell. The U.S. State Department had issued a $7 million reward for information about him. He was in line to succeed the late Fuad Shukr, killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on July 30, as Nasrallah’s second-in-command.
The pager attacks, believed to have been mounted with small amounts of plastic explosive embedded in the pagers that were detonated with an electronic signal, have torn a huge hole in Hezbollah’s capabilities, Israeli military analyst Elliot Chodoff told The Epoch Times.
The booby-trapped pagers were carried by those with responsibility, not by every rank-and-file Hezbollah soldier, he said.
One that exploded belonged to and wounded Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, underscoring Iran’s deep involvement with Hezbollah and with terror generally in Lebanon and Syria.
Many of the Hezbollah terrorists were seriously wounded and will require extensive treatment. They won’t be returning to their jobs any time soon, he said.
Should Israel’s war with Hezbollah ramp up, Lebanon’s hospitals are already full with these wounded, Chodoff said. “There’s no place to send casualties.”
Hezbollah will have a hard time replacing leaders who were just taken out, he said. The pagers were carried by company commanders and platoon leaders, many of whom are more critical where they’re based than commanders a couple of ranks higher.
Hezbollah’s military, which relies heavily on technological platforms, will now find all its technology suspect, according to an analysis by Zahavi’s Alma Research and Education Center. The center also noted the psychological impact on Hezbollah, as it sees its technological advantages turning into liabilities.
Hezbollah has been humiliated by the attacks, Chodoff said, not just in the eyes of Israel or Western nations, but in the eyes of many Lebanese who don’t like the terror group and want it removed from power and many people in other Middle Eastern countries who harbor grudges against Shiites.
Totalitarian groups like Hezbollah, he said, can’t afford this kind of humiliation. “Their power rests very heavily on their prestige and the myth of their invincibility,” Chodoff said.
The Radwan Forces, which suffered losses in the attack, is the one designated to cross the border and commit the Oct. 7-style attacks, he said.
Israel’s fear of such attacks was greater in the north after Oct. 7. One reason more than 80,000 border residents were evacuated after Oct. 7 was the fear that Hezbollah would attempt the same thing.
