He was alive at the beginning. This was stated by Iran and sources close to Hezbollah. But the Lebanese militia party did not speak Friday afternoon, after Israel attacked its headquarters in Dahie, a southern suburb of Beirut, with a barrage of two-thousand-ton bombs. It took Hezbollah six hours to speak, and when it did, the message was strangely contradictory to what had previously been stated: “We have not located the direction”the group admitted to the British agency Reuters.
By “the leadership,” Hezbollah spokesmen referred to their leader, Hassan Nasrallahtarget of the attack which destroyed six buildings in a very densely populated district of the Lebanese capital. “Everyone thinks he is dead,” confidential sources in the Lebanese government told this newspaper on Friday evening. Despite the statements of the official Iranian news agency, this intuition also spread in Israel: “I think it is too early to say. » [que no está muerto]… Sometimes they hide the fact when we succeed,” an Israeli army officer said at a press conference.
In fact, according to a senior Israeli official Telegraphthe decision of the Israeli Prime Minister to continue his trip to the UN General Assembly despite the escalation of fighting with Hezbollah “It was part of a diversion” to “put” Nasrallah to sleep and make him believe that Israel would not attack him as long as the Prime Minister was in New York. But he did it: Shortly after the attack, the prime minister’s office released a photo of Netanyahu speaking on the phone in his hotel room and saying “yes,” from the outskirts of the United Nations, to the series of bomb attacks that shook Beirut. this Friday.
Netanyahu authorizing Dahie attack by telephone from New York.
Efe
Killing or neutralizing Nasrallah would be a blow to Hezbollah, a militia led by the same man for 32 years. Replacing it would pose an even greater challenge today than at any time in recent years: the recent Israeli attacks They ended the lives of virtually all senior officers of Hezbollah, with the exception Hachem Safieddincousin of Nasrallah and member of the party’s Jihad Council.
Safieddin is actually the most popular name among possible successors to Nasrallah. But we still don’t know where he is. Although the same source close to Hezbollah who declared Nasrallah alive said Friday afternoon that he was “safe” after the Dahie attack, neither the group has corroborated this information, nor Israeli media appear accept this version.
At Israel Times An army officer told him hours after the attack: “It’s very difficult to imagine him coming out alive from a blow like that.” ” And Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, celebrated that the bombing had hit its target “with very high precision.”
Until now, the IDF attacks in Beirut had been “selective assassinations” senior Hezbollah commanders, even though they resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians. In the case of this Friday’s attacks, Israeli Defense Ministry sources cited by Haaretz They estimate that there was a total of 300 dead of the attack on Dahie.
Israel’s latest miscalculation in the Lebanese capital dates back to September 23, when the army launched an “objective elimination” operation against Ali Karakimilitary leader of the Raduán Force after the assassination of Ibrahim Aqil three days before. Karaki, who is now considered Hezbollah’s third leader, is still alive according to the party’s militia.
In the early hours of Saturday, attacks continued in the southern neighborhoods of Beirut against alleged anti-ship missile arsenals hidden in different parts of the Dahie. Nor in southern Lebanon.
At two a.m., the Israeli army confirmed that it had “eliminated” the commander of Hezbollah’s missile unit, Mohammed Ali Ismailalready his second, Hossein Ahmed Ismaïl. Hezbollah also claimed several rocket attacks against Israel in the hours after the Beirut attack, a sign that the party can still carry out such operations after Israel said it attacked its command center.
