Hezbollah announced that Haytham Ali Tabatabai, its most senior military leader, was killed when Israel carried out an air raid on Beirut.
The strike, which hit an apartment building in Dahiyeh, the movement’s power base in southern Beirut, also left at least five others dead.
According to the group, “the great commander” Tabatabai lost his life in “a treacherous Israeli attack on the Haret Hreik area in the southern suburbs of Beirut”.
Although the statement did not clarify the exact post he held, Tabatabai was widely known as the chief of staff of Hezbollah’s armed forces.
Israeli authorities said they had “eliminated” him in the strike. Before this announcement, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Tabatabai had been the intended target.
Israeli media noted that this was the military’s third attempt to assassinate him since the war that erupted the previous year.
Mahmoud Qmati, a senior Hezbollah figure, warned that Israel had violated a major “red line”.
He said the leadership was evaluating how the organisation might respond, adding, “The strike on the southern suburbs today opens the door to an escalation of assaults all over Lebanon.”
Tabatabai, born in 1968 in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and Iranian father, grew up in southern Lebanon and entered Hezbollah ranks at the age of 12.
The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health reported that the Israeli raid wounded 28 people.
Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) said two missiles slammed into the residential building on al-Arid Street in Haret Hreik, causing heavy destruction to nearby vehicles and surrounding structures.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun urged urgent and decisive international intervention to halt Israel’s attacks.
Earlier in the day, he reiterated that Lebanon “reiterates its call to the international community to assume its responsibility and intervene firmly and seriously to stop the attacks on Lebanon and its people”.
The killing of Tabatabai marks the highest-ranking Hezbollah assassination by Israel since the November 2024 ceasefire that was intended to end more than a year of clashes.
Just over a year ago, Israel also assassinated longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an air attack on southern Beirut.
This latest strike occurred only days before Pope Leo XIV is expected to visit Lebanon, at a moment when Israeli aggression in the country has sharply intensified.
