Israel carried out the strike that killed the second-in-command of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, in a southern suburb of Beirut on Tuesday, a senior US Defense Department official said on Wednesday.

“This is an Israeli strike,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity, without elaborating.

Saleh al-Aruri, 57, a founding member of the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military wing, was killed in an airstrike.

Although it has not officially claimed responsibility for his death, Israel is widely believed to have been behind the strike, which killed at least six other Hamas members and operatives.

Israel’s civilian-military leadership has vowed to “eliminate” Hamas after its unprecedented attack on southern sectors of Israeli territory on October 7 killed some 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official statements. of the authorities. It was the deadliest attack by the Jewish state in 1948.

Fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also took about 250 people hostage that day, more than 100 of whom were released in late November as part of a week-long truce in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinians.

In retaliation, Israel’s military has since pounded relentlessly from air, land and sea into the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas, under Israeli blockade since 2007 and under total siege since October 9.

The war, which has not led to the elimination of the most important Hamas figures in the Gaza Strip, has claimed the lives of at least 22,313 people, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the Palestinian movement’s health ministry.

Tensions have soared since the war broke out on the Israel/Lebanon border, in Syria and Iraq, where US bases have been targeted in more than a hundred attacks, and in the Red Sea, where Houthi rebels have been launching strikes on merchant ships, causing problems in international trade by sea.

Last night the leader of the Lebanese Shiite faction Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, warned Israel against further escalation, strongly reacting to the death of Saleh al-Arouri.