Israel strikes on Beirut aimed at Hezbollah commander hit 1,300 targets

Ali Karaki survived in bombings which killed 356 people, Iran-backed terror group claims

A second Israeli air strike on the Shia suburbs of southern Beirut in just four days was aimed at killing Ali Karaki, the movement’s military chief in southern Lebanon and one of Hezbollah’s last remaining battlefield commanders on Monday.
It was unclear if he was killed. Hezbollah claimed that he had survived and been moved to a safe house.
The possible death of Karaki would remove yet another of Hezbollah’s most seasoned and senior military leaders, dealing the Iran-backed group another significant blow as it struggles with Israel’s increasingly ferocious offensive to destroy its missile-firing capabilities.
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With its positions under attack across southern Lebanon and its strongholds in the Bekaa Valley in the east, Hezbollah fired 165 rockets and other munitions across the border, including a barrage aimed at Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Most of the rockets were intercepted.
With no anti-missile capacity of its own, Hezbollah undoubtedly had the worst of Monday’s exchanges, with Israeli hitting more than 1,300 targets in by far the most intense day of the 11-month confrontation between the two sides.
Lebanon’s health minister said at least 356 people, including 24 children, had been killed and over 1,200 wounded in the strikes.
The movement’s capacity has been severely degraded over the past week. Synchronised attacks on its pagers and walkie-talkie radios incapacitated thousands of its rank-and-file members and severely disrupted its ability to communicate.
An air strike on Friday killed several senior commanders, including Ibrahim Akil, Hezbollah’s special forces chief — a strike that would have badly hampered the group’s ability to plan an effective response to the Israeli offensive.
After the attacks, Israel signalled that it was embarking on “a new phase” in its conflict with the group.
With the Israeli military’s firepower increasingly being concentrated on its second, northern front, that new phase is clearly underway.
Despite the series of successful blows struck against its enemy, it is far from clear whether an air offensive alone will be enough to silence Hezbollah’s rocket fire and allow 60,000 Israeli residents to return to their homes in the north of the country.
So far at least, Hezbollah shows little sign of backing down, despite the admission from its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, last week that the attacks had damaged the group.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned his people of “complicated days” ahead but said that the new strategy would allow Israel to regain the initiative against Hezbollah.
“I promised that we would change the security balance, the balance of power in the north,” he said. “That is exactly what we are doing.”
While the military effectiveness of Israel’s escalation remains to be seen, for the moment it is Lebanese civilians who are paying the price.
Israel said it had attempted to contact at least 80,000 people to warn them to evacuate villages where it claimed Hezbollah had hidden rockets, replicating a tactic used in Gaza since the onset of hostilities there last October.
Israeli text messages and voice recordings warned residents to leave villages used by Hezbollah and stay 1,000m away until they received a new message telling them it was safe to return.
It was followed later by a video message from Mr Netanyahu urging all Lebanese civilians to “get out of harm’s way”.
Having lived through the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah which laid waste to swathes of southern Lebanon, many did not have to be told twice — although some of those fleeing also pointed out that they had little idea where Hezbollah hid its weapons.
“We have lived through this before,” said one woman, who identified herself only as Najat, after she fled the southern city of Tyre with her family.
“We fled in 2006 and we are refugees again — but this time the situation was worse. Tyre was hit more times today than in the whole of that war.”
Until now both Israel and Hezbollah have sought to avoid being drawn into a repeat of the 34-day war of 2006 in which the two sides fought each other to a bloody and inconclusive standstill in the mountains of southern Lebanon.
So far, although a full air offensive seems to be underway, Israel has not yet shown any appetite for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Such a move would be risky for an exhausted army stretched thin by continuing war in Gaza and operations in the occupied West Bank.