Hezbollah confirmed that its top commander, Fouad Shukr, was in the building where the Israeli attack took place in Beirut, while adding that searches are continuing to find his body..

The Iran-backed group’s first comment after the strike targeting Fouad Shukr came hours after Hamas leader Ismail Haniya was killed. Hezbollah has not commented on the death of the Hamas leader.

According to analysts, the two separate attacks by Israel which resulted in the killing of two senior leaders of the two Iran-backed groups within hours may escalate tension in the region.

On their part, The Israeli armed forces assured on Tuesday that they had “eliminated” a top official of the military arm of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the one “responsible”, according to them, for the rocket attack on a town in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on Saturday, which killed 12 children, and they had declared that they would retaliate, raising another scale of the conflict, against the background of concern about ignition of the region, against the background of the ongoing, for the 299th day, war in the Gaza Strip.

Aircraft of the Israeli Air Force “eliminated” a top official of the military arm of the “Hezbollah terrorist organization”, Fouad Shukr, “in the Beirut area”, according to their statement.

Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Fuad Shukr was “responsible” for the attack on the occupied and Israeli-annexed part of the Golan Heights on Saturday, which killed children in a Druze town.

Three civilians — a woman and two children — were killed and 74 others were injured in the Israeli shelling in a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital, according to the still preliminary report released by the Lebanese Ministry of Health.

According to an AFP source close to Hezbollah, Fouad Shukr, who plays a “front-line role in operations (…) against Israel from southern Lebanon”, survived.

Hezbollah has been accused by Israel and the US of firing the rocket that killed 12 children between the ages of 10 and 16 on Saturday as they played on a soccer field in the Golan town of Mazdal Shams. The Lebanese movement denied it.

Hezbollah “crossed the red line,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallad repeated last night, minutes after the bombing. “Tonight, we showed that the blood of our people has a price and that no location is beyond the reach of our forces,” he added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who announced yesterday Monday that there was going to be a “severe” retaliation for the attack, presided over an “assessment of the security situation” at the Ministry of Defense last night, his services announced.

In the southern suburb of Beirut where the strike took place, the top floor of an eight-story apartment building was torn to pieces: a huge hole could be seen, from where electrical cables were hanging. Ambulances, sirens blaring, scrambled to make their way through the thick crowd around wrecked vehicles.

According to the State Department, Fouad Shukr played a “key role” in “Hezbollah’s military operations in Syria,” as well as in the 1983 attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut.

In 2017, Washington announced that it was offering a large reward for information leading to the identification of two Hezbollah leaders; one of the two was Fouad Shukr.

Concerns about the spillover into Lebanon of the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement, if not a region-wide war, are growing.

Israeli military spokesman Hagari said late at night that “Hezbollah’s continued aggression and barbaric attacks are leading the people of Lebanon and the entire Middle East to greater escalation.”

“While we would prefer hostilities to be resolved without an extended conflict, (the Israeli armed forces) are fully prepared for all scenarios,” the vice admiral said.

Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, in support of the Palestinians of Gaza, has opened a front with Israel on the border with Lebanon since the day after the unprecedented attack by the military arm of the Palestinian Islamist movement in southern sectors of the Israeli territory on October 7. the trigger of war. Since then, the Lebanese movement and the Israeli armed forces have exchanged fire daily.

The American vice-president and candidate of the Democrats in the presidential elections in November, Kamala Harris, ruled yesterday that Israel has the “right to defend itself” against Hezbollah, which she described as a “terrorist organization”. He added, however, that “we must work for a diplomatic solution to end the attacks.”

The Prime Minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, for his part, condemned the Israeli bombing, denouncing the “blatant attack”, the “criminal act”, and calling on the international community to “put pressure” on Israel to “stop (.. .) his threats’.

Iran, which backs Hezbollah, said the Israeli strike would not prevent “the proud Lebanese resistance from continuing (…) to support the oppressed Palestinians and fight against Israel’s aggression.”

Russia accused Israel of violating international law.

“The solution cannot be military,” said UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Janine Hennis-Plaschert.

The international community continues its efforts to prevent the threatened spread of the conflict.

Earlier yesterday, an Israeli civilian in his 30s was killed when a rocket landed in northern Israel, while the military said it retaliated to a Hezbollah rocket barrage by firing into Lebanese territory. Earlier, he announced that he had hit about ten Hezbollah facilities “in seven different zones” and killed a member of the Lebanese movement.

On the other hand, Hezbollah announced that it had launched several attacks, two against northern Israel.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, explosions were heard late yesterday at a base of the Hasd al-Shaabi (“Popular Mobilization Units”) of the Iraqi paramilitary alliance close to Iran, south of Baghdad, killing at least four of its fighters and injuring others. A US official told Reuters news agency that it was a strike by the US armed forces, speaking of a “threat” to the forces of the Washington-led anti-jihadist coalition in Iraqi territory, hours after Israel’s raid on Beirut.

The war in the Gaza Strip erupted on October 7 when Hamas’s military arm launched an unprecedented raid on southern Israel that killed 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted that day, 111 are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip, but 39 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

In retaliation, Israel has vowed to wipe out the Palestinian Islamist movement, in power in the enclave since 2007, which the US and EU designate as a terrorist organization.

Large-scale operations by the Israeli armed forces have since killed at least 39,400 people in the Gaza Strip, most of them civilians, according to the latest figures from the Hamas government’s health ministry.

Artillery shelling was reported yesterday in Khan Younis and Rafah (south), Al Buraij refugee camp (central) and Gaza City (north).

Civil protection reported that Israeli operations in Khan Younis since July 22 resulted in the killing of some 300 people. The Israeli army announced earlier yesterday that it had “ended” the operation after its units killed “more than 150 terrorists”.

According to AFP correspondents, tanks opened fire on the eastern part of Khan Yunis early yesterday. At least eight bodies were recovered from the area, according to search and rescue teams and doctors.