Israeli authorities confirmed on Tuesday night that one of their bombings, carried out on Beirut three weeks ago, killed Hashem Safieddine, president of the Hezbollah Consultative Council. Safieddine was, in addition, considered a possible successor to the leader of this group of the also murdered Hasan Nasrallahwhose cousin he was. Safieddine, whose death has not been confirmed by his co-religionists, “had a great influence on the party’s decision-making process on various issues” and was the one who replaced the leader during his absences from Lebanon, according to an army statement issued to him. He also accuses him of directing “terrorist acts against Israel.”
The Government of Benjamin Netanyahu assures that it will continue hunting down the top officials of the Shiite group and anyone who causes harm to the State or its citizens. In the last two days they claim to have killed three other commanders and about 70 militiamen of the group in southern Lebanon, where troops maintain a land invasion for almost a month. At the same time, the army continues to issue forced evacuation orders to the population from areas they consider combative. This Wednesday it touched some neighborhoods of the city of Tire, on the Mediterranean coast, and about twenty kilometers from the border, whose inhabitants are demanded to go north.
The great pressure on the militia does not prevent it from continuing to harass Israel on a daily basis. The alarms went off in Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning, while the US Secretary of State was in this city, Antony Blinken, on his eleventh trip to the region since the war began. Before it continued its journey towards Saudi Arabia, local anti-aircraft defenses shot down two missiles launched from Lebanese territory.
Along with Hashem Safieddine, according to the Israeli army statement, one of the senior intelligence officers of the Shiite party-militia, Ali Hussein Hazma, and other members of the group also died in that attack carried out on the night of October 3 to 4. . The planes hit an underground barracks located in the suburb of Dahiye, a stronghold of the formation in the south of the Lebanese capital and one of the main objectives of the current Israeli military offensive unleashed by land and air in the last month. It is in that same neighborhood that an attack carried out in the same way on Friday, September 27, killed Nasrallah, the historical leader of a militia born in 1982 and which is directly supported by Iran.
It is not the first time that Israel has taken a few weeks to confirm that it has managed to eliminate one of its most important enemies. Unlike Yahia Sinwarleader of Hamas, whom the military killed last week in Gaza and whose body has been transferred to Israel, the attacks from the air with bombs weighing hundreds of kilos that cross even security shelters dug into the subsoil sometimes prevent us from knowing Who have they killed? This happened with the head of Hamas’s military wing in the Strip, Mohamed Deifwhose death in a bombing in early July was not announced until August 1, although Hamas has not confirmed it, as has happened with Sinwar.
