Israel-Lebanon latest: Another Hezbollah chief killed in strikes as Nasrallah’s ‘body recovered in Beirut’

An Israeli strike on Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley has killed a senior figure in the Sunni Jama’a Islamiya group, Mohammad Dahrouj, two security sources claim.

The Sunni Islamist political group has fired rockets on Israel over the past year and Israel has previously conducted strikes targeting other leading figures from the group.

More than two days after a massive Israeli airstrike that killed the leader of the Hezbollah militant group, smoke is still rising from the smoldering wreckage.

People flocked to the site, some to check on what was left of their homes, others to pay respects and pray, and others simply to see the destruction.

Residents of Beirut heard up to 10 explosions following the Friday strike that targeted an area greater than a city block, reducing several residential buildings to a jumble of pancaked concrete and twisted steel. The buildings sank into the ground, leaving a cleared-out area nearly the size of a football field.

Weapons experts said the blasts and destruction left behind were consistent with the 2,000lb-class bombs (900kg).

Onlookers at the site today clambered over slabs of concrete, surrounded by piles of twisted metal and wreckage. Several craters, likely to be used by rescuers to penetrate under the site of the explosion were visible, some of them apparently up to 30m (100ft) deep.

A few Hezbollah workers were using a bulldozer to excavate around one of the craters. State security and investigators were nowhere to be seen.

Supporters of Hezbollah and other Lebanese people who hailed the group’s role fighting Israel mourned the death of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.

“We lost the leader who gave us all the strength and faith that we, this small country that we love, could turn it into a paradise,” Sophia Blanche Rouillard, a Lebanese Christian who carried a black flag to work in Beirut on Sunday, told Reuters.

An Arab Barometer poll in Lebanon earlier this year found that just 30 per cent trusted Hezbollah, whereas 55 per cent said they did not trust the group at all.

Those who said they trust the group rose to 85 per cent among Shia Muslims, but was just 9 per cent of Sunnis and Druze, and 6 per cent of Christians.

Here is a snippet from The Independent’s editorial on the killing of Hassan Nasrallah:

In the short term, of course, it will demoralise Hezbollah and its allies in Hamas and Iran. If the assassination is a substitute for the “all-out war” that was feared in southern Lebanon, that may be no bad thing. But it will not defeat Hezbollah, nor will it kill the aim that it espouses of wiping Israel off the map.

It has to be remembered that Hezbollah was formed in the first place to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel invaded to try to stop the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), originally a secular nationalist movement, from launching attacks from there. The PLO was thus supplanted by an Islamist state within a state in Lebanon.

A decade later, Israel assassinated Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s leader, only for him to be replaced by Nasrallah who was, if anything, more extreme and more dangerous. This is the hydra principle in action: assassinating the leaders of militant organisations tends to lead to their replacement by harder-line commanders.

As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff who played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace talks, has said: “Unintended consequences tend to prevail.” Mr Powell has argued that “terrorists” almost always have to be negotiated with in the end. A policy of decapitation makes that harder because the new leaders will be more extreme and less likely to be worn down by years of fighting.

Hezbollah has now confirmed that its senior leader Ali Karaki was killed in the Israeli strike that killed the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The Israeli military claims to have uncovered and dismantled a Hamas tunnel in central Gaza that was more than a kilometre long.

The tunnel ran near residential buildings, and inside were several rooms and equipment used by militants for prolonged stays, the military said, releasing footage showing a long staircase leading underground and what appeared to be an iron blast door.

Hamas is believed to have built hundreds of kilometeres of tunnels across Gaza to evade Israeli airstrikes. The militants have also used the tunnels to hold hostages captured in the 7 October attack that triggered the war.

The body of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been recovered from the site of an Israeli airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs and is intact, a medical source and a security source has told Reuters.

While Hezbollah’s statement on Saturday confirming Nasrallah’s death did not say how exactly he was killed nor when his funeral would be, the two sources said his body had no direct wounds and that it appeared the cause of death was blunt trauma from the force of the blast.

In his first public remarks since the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu said: “He wasn’t another terrorist. He was the terrorist.”

He said Nasrallah’s killing would help bring displaced Israelis back to their homes in the north and would pressure Hamas to free Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

But with the threat of retaliation high, he said the coming days will bring “significant challenges” and warned Iran against trying to strike.

“There is no place in Iran or in the Middle East that Israel’s long arm cannot reach,” he said. “Today you know how much that is true.”

Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon have been displaced by the ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, a Lebanese cabinet minister spearheading the country’s emergency response said.

Environment minister Nasser Yassin said the government estimates that about 250,000 people have left their homes and taken refuge in government-run shelters and informal ones. However, he told the Associated Press the total number is about “four times as many directly affected and/or displaced outside the shelters.”

The United Nations said that, as of Friday, 211,319 people were forced to relocate – even prior to the intensive Israeli airstrikes over Beirut’s southern suburbs over the past two days.

The Lebanese government has converted schools and other facilities into temporary shelters. But still many are sleeping on the streets or in public squares, as the government and non-governmental organisations try to find them places to stay.