Among the rubble of a ten-story building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanese rescuers continued to search for bodies on Saturday morning, September 21. The day before, shortly before 4:00 p.m., in the heart of this Hezbollah stronghold, while the streets around the Al Naïm mosque were crowded with residents returning from work, after picking up their children from school, several missiles targeted the basement of the building, killing Ibrahim Aqil, the commander of the elite Radwan force, and the Hezbollah fighters with whom he was meeting.
The bodies of two buildings, reduced to dust, closed like a coffin over the militants, as well as the families living on the floor above. In a provisional report, the Lebanese Ministry of Health counted fourteen dead and sixty-six wounded, nine of them in critical condition. Panicked and already terrified by a series of explosions that targeted Hezbollah’s telecommunications systems on Tuesday and Wednesday, costing thirty-seven dead and nearly three thousand wounded, residents packed their bags and left as Israeli drones flew overhead.
Israel has chosen not to offer Hezbollah a truce and to erase all red lines in order to get the Shiite party to stop its attacks on its territory at all costs. At the risk of precipitating an open confrontation. In October 2023, Shortly after Hamas’ attack on the Jewish state, Hezbollah has opened a front in support of the Gaza Strip, caught under an avalanche of Israeli fire. Although the Party of God has not yet absorbed the impact of the Israeli sabotage operation earlier this week, and which its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed to inflict on Israel in response “a terrible punishment”The decapitation of the Radwan force commander is another major setback.
“A great jihadist leader”
During the night from Friday to Saturday, Hezbollah confirmed the death of Ibrahim Aqil, presenting him as “a great jihadist leader” and that of another senior member of the Radwan force, Ahmed Mahmoud Wehbe, in the attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as the death of fifteen other fighters, without specifying their unit or the location of their attack. “martyrdom”. “The Hezbollah commanders we eliminated today had been planning their October 7 for years. [2023] on the northern border »Israeli army chief General Herzi Halevi had said earlier.
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