Hezbollah’s Battlegrounds: A New Development in the War Between Syria and the Middle East, as Declared by the United Nations

“The weakened and battered state of Hezbollah provides a short window of opportunity to diminish its strategic capabilities further before civilian harm prompts international pressure on Israel to cease operations,” she wrote in an analysis. Israel and the US need to put together an exit strategy in order to end the northern conflict.

The scope of Israel’s operation remains unclear, but officials have said a ground invasion to push the militant group away from the border is a possibility. Israel moved thousands of troops toward the border in preparation.

85,000 people are staying in public schools and other shelters as a result of the fighting, according to the United Nations. Air strikes have disrupted access to clean water for more than 300,000 people and forced the closure of 20 primary health care centers.

Israel’s military says several airstrikes Friday in central Beirut have killed the long-time leader of the Hezbollah militant group, Hassan Nasrallah, in what represents another dramatic new development in a conflict that has metastasized across the Middle East region since last October.

Israeli army spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the strikes targeted the main Hezbollah headquarters, saying it was located underground beneath residential buildings.

The announcement Saturday of Hezbollah’s leader added that the group’s senior military commander for the region close to Lebanon’s border with Israel was also killed. This would indicate that most of Hezbollah’s commands had been taken out by Israeli attacks in the past two months.

Israel provided no immediate comment about the type of bomb or how many it used, but the resulting explosion levelled an area greater than a city block. The Israeli army has a great deal of American-made guided bombs that are designed to hit subterranean targets.

Footage showed rescue workers clambering over large slabs of concrete, surrounded by high piles of twisted metal and wreckage. Several craters were visible, one with a car toppled into it. A stream of residents carrying their belongings were seen fleeing along a main road out of the district.

The series of blasts at around nightfall reduced six apartment towers to rubble in Haret Hreik, a densely populated, predominantly Shiite district of Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburbs, according to Lebanon’s national news agency. A wall of billowing black and orange smoke rose into the sky as windows were rattled and houses shaken some 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Beirut.

News of the blasts came as Netanyahu was briefing reporters after his U.N. address. Netanyahu ended the briefing after the military aide whispered into his ear.

The Israeli War on the Hezbollah Regime: Syria, Lebanon, and Tel Aviv, and the Palestinian War on Rassaallah

There are expected to be more deaths caused by teams combing through the ruins of six buildings. Israel launched a series of strikes on other areas after the initial blast.

The health ministry said in a statement late Friday that six people had died and more than 90 were injured in the strikes, but authorities said that they were still clearing rubble and that the numbers would likely rise.

An Israeli security official said he expects the campaign against Hezbollah would not last for as long as the current war in Gaza, because the military’s goals are much narrower.

The people in the crowd waved their fists in the air, and chanted, “We will never accept humiliation” as they marched behind the coffins.

Hezbollah officials and their supporters remain defiant. Many thousand people attended the funeral of three Hezbollah members killed in earlier strikes, including the group’s drone unit head, Mohammed Surya, who was killed in the blasts.

In the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, civil defense workers pulled the bodies of two women — 35-year-old Hiba Ataya and her mother Sabah Olyan — from the rubble of a building brought down by a strike.

In Gaza, Israel aims to dismantle Hamas’ military and political regime, but the goal in Lebanon is to push Hezbollah away from the border — “not a high bar like Gaza” in terms of operational objectives, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to military briefing guidelines.

In a post on the social media platform X, the Israeli military wrote that Nasrallah would “no longer be able to terrorize the world,” prompting loud music to ring out across Tel Aviv in celebration of his death.

Nasrallah only very rarely made public appearances during his 32-year tenure atop a group that several nations, including the United States, have labeled a terrorist organization.

Israel’s defeat of Hezbollah, the axis of resistance and the crisis in the Middle East: The role of the killing on the “Shura Council”

Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Chief of the General Staff, issued a video statement Saturday saying that the strikes Friday that had targeted Hezbollah’s leadership wasn’t the end of Israel’s toolbox.

It is thought that Hezbollah is in a state of crisis, because the leader is willing to take the high risk of his life to gather with other commanders during Israel’s campaign.

“The level of shock among Hezbollah cannot be measured,” Al Sabaileh said. They didn’t expect that Israel would launch and continue attacks on Hezbollah.

Sanam Vakil is the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think tank Chatham House.

“Iran will be looking for some way to turn the tables and save some face,” Vakil wrote in a long series of online posts about the killing and its impact on Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups like the Houthis in Yemen. The axis did not help with the deterrence against Israel or the cease-fire in Gaza.

But Orna Mizrahi, an Israeli security expert from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said Israel’s successes in degrading Hezbollah’s leadership structure and military capabilities could be leveraged to reach a lasting agreement that would force Hezbollah forces back from Lebanon’s border with northern Israel.

Hezbollah’s succession plans and the process by which Nasrallah may be replaced are opaque, but should follow a blueprint that saw his own elevation more than 30 years ago, according to Nick Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and long-time expert of Hezbollah based in Beirut.

Blanford says that a repetition of what occurred in 1992 is what will be significant for Hezbollah. “The Shura Council sits down and they elect somebody else.”

“We agreed on the need for an immediate ceasefire to bring an end to the bloodshed,” Lammy said. “A diplomatic solution is the only way to restore security and stability for the Lebanese and Israeli people.”

The killing of Nasrallah is fraught with even greater dramatic consequences in the Middle East, according to a statement from Russia’s foreign ministry. Moscow called on Israel to stop hostilities aimed at Lebanon.

Iraqi state television announced a three-day period of mourning to honor the martyrdom of Nasrullah. The station said the heinous crime will make people stronger in their resistance to the mean “Zionists”.

“Syrians are more concerned at the moment with getting them to safety, and helping them in the humanitarian sense,” Makki said, while acknowledging the broader impact of the Hezbollah leader’s death. “Nasrallah is a very huge individual in the region and has been part and parcel of the politics of the Middle East.”

The country of Lebanon has been under attack by Israel in the past week, with thousands fleeing the country. Danny Makki, a Syrian journalist, told NPR that many had poured over the border to Syria.

In the past few days, thousands of reservists have also been called up and deployed to the country’s border with Lebanon, as Hezbollah continues to trade rocket fire with Israeli ground forces using artillery and tanks.

The Israeli military said the Hezbollah leader was killed at his main headquarters underneath a residential building in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. Ali Karki, Hezbollah’s acting deputy, and other Hezbollah commanders, were among the people killed as they were planning attacks on Israel.

It described Nasrallah as “a great martyr, a heroic, bold, brave, wise, insightful, and faithful leader,” and would remain, despite his death, “still among us with his thought, spirit, line and sacred approach.”

Biden said Nasrallah was a measure of justice for the victims of his four-decade reign of terror.

To highlight the attack’s potential to ignite an even wider Middle East conflict, the semiofficial Iranian news agency, Mehr, reported that an operational head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan, had also been killed in the strike. Iran supplies weapons and missile technology to Hezbollah, as well as financing the group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the UN General Assembly at the time of the Hezbollah attack. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with protocol, said Netanyahu greenlit the strike before he delivered his address.

Netanyahu said that the assassination of Nasrallah was an essential condition for Israel to achieve its war goals.

The restrictions were put in place by the Israeli military in a sign that they were preparing for a possible Hezbollah strike.

Netanyahu’s “norther front” against Israel and the cross-border exchanges of fire between Lebanon and Hezbollah

“Nasrallah, the next day, made the fateful decision to join hands with Hamas and open what he called a ‘northern front’ against Israel,” Biden said in a statement.

Biden noted the operation to take out Nasrallah happened in October of the previous year. Hamas attacks against Israel.

Even as Israeli forces prepared for a response to retaliatory strikes from Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Information Minister said on Sunday that negotiations for a ceasefire with Israel were still “underway” even as cross-border exchanges of fire continued.

Israel’s killing of Nasrallah, in particular, represents another dramatic new development for a conflict that has metastasized across the Middle East region since last October.

The latest exchanges of fire and Israel’s preparations to invade southern Lebanon have made some fear that the conflict is headed toward an all-out war.

The IDF said it hit open areas with eight projectiles that were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Sunday.

According to the statement on the messenger app Telegram, the air forces of the Israel Defense Forces targeted buildings where weapons and military structures were stored.

Benjamin Netanyahu came back to Israel earlier than expected as it was reported that he was going to invade southern Lebanon after his troops were called up to the north.