IDF strike in Beirut kills Hezbollah missile chief, as rockets pummel Israel
Lebanese authorities say 6 killed and 15 wounded in strike, some 560 killed since conflict spiked; IDF reservist moderately hurt by shrapnel
Intense cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continued on Tuesday, including an Israeli airstrike in the Lebanese capital, as the terror group fired some 300 rockets at northern Israel, setting off sirens in cities including Haifa, Safed, Nazareth, and Yokne’am as well as across the Galilee.
The target of the strike in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut was the head of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile division Ibrahim Qubaisi.
The Israel Defense Forces said he had been killed in the attack, alongside at least two other top commanders in the terror group.
Hezbollah confirmed his death hours later, releasing a statement saying Qubaisi was “martyred on the road to Jerusalem,” its term for operatives killed in Israeli strikes.
Qubaisi commanded Hezbollah’s various rocket and missile units, including its precision-guided missile unit, according to the military.
“Over the years and during the war, he was responsible for the launches at the Israeli home front. Qubaisi was a central source of of knowledge in the field of missiles, and was close to the senior military leadership of Hezbollah,” the IDF said.
He joined Hezbollah in the 1980s, and served in several other significant roles, including a senior position in the terror group’s operations division and as the head of the Badr regional division, the IDF said.
It added that Qubaisi also planned Hezbollah’s kidnapping attack in Mount Dov in 2000, in which IDF soldiers Staff Sgt. Benyamin Avraham, Staff Sgt. Adi Avitan, and Staff Sgt. Omar Sawaid were killed and abducted.
Their bodies were returned in a prisoner exchange in 2004.
The IDF released footage of the strike.
The strike in the Dahiyeh suburb, a known Hezbollah stronghold, was the fifth Israeli attack on Beirut amid the war. At least six people were killed in the strike and 15 were wounded, according to Lebanese health officials. “An Israeli strike targeted two floors in a residential building in the Ghobeiri area,” a Lebanese security source told AFP.
Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the attack.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said Tuesday morning following a military assessment that Israel will be further escalating its actions against Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah must not be given a break. [We must] keep working with all our might,” he said in remarks provided by the IDF. “We will accelerate the offensive operations today and bolster all the arrays. The situation requires continued intensive action on all fronts.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah continued to fire barrages of rockets deep into northern Israel, while the IDF responded with strikes on hundreds of the Iran-backed group’s sites, including residential buildings where the military said Hezbollah was hiding rockets and missiles ready for launch at Israel.
As explosions rocked both Israel and Lebanon, a dismayed international community responded with calls for de-escalation in what the European Union’s top diplomat said was close to all-out war, after almost a year of fighting that began with Hezbollah attacks in solidarity with Hamas after the latter terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel.
The Lebanese health ministry raised the death toll in the IDF’s extensive airstrikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon since Monday to some 660. Another 1,835 were wounded, the ministry said. The figures do not differentiate between members of the terror group and civilians.
In Israel, an IDF reservist was moderately wounded by shrapnel during a rocket barrage at the Mount Carmel area, south of Haifa. The Magen David Adom ambulance service said it treated the 25-year-old at the scene near the Elyakim Junction and took him to a hospital.
In another attack on areas east of Haifa, shrapnel from an intercepted rocket lightly wounded a 58-year-old woman, medics said. She too was taken to a hospital.
Several other people have been lightly injured during the rocket attacks from falling shrapnel or as they rushed to bomb shelters after sirens went off.
Throughout the morning Hezbollah rockets fell in the Galilee Panhandle, areas east and south of Haifa, the Jezreel Valley, the Lower Galilee, and the cities of Afula and Nazareth.
A barrage of 50 rockets also pounded the northern border town of Kiryat Shmona and surrounding areas. Municipal warehouses were among the locations hit in Kiryat Shmona, local authorities said.
At least one building caught fire, sending thick black smoke into the air.
Dashboard footage showed the moment a rocket fired from Lebanon hit a road between Tamra and Kabul in northern Israel. There were no injuries reported.
Magen David Adom said paramedics treated a number of people hurt while running for shelter or who were suffering from severe anxiety caused by rocket sirens in communities across the north. MDA also said that one of its ambulances in the Jezreel Valley was damaged by shrapnel during a rocket attack in the early morning hours.
Police said interceptors and unspecified weaponry impacted in several areas of Nazareth and the surrounding area, causing damage.
In the afternoon, a home was damaged by a rocket in the northern town of Rosh Pina, but no injuries were caused.
As of Tuesday evening, the IDF said that some 300 rockets had been fired at northern Israel throughout the day.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in an evening press conference that Hezbollah planned to launch more rockets on Tuesday. “We are foiling, striking, and disrupting its attacks,” he said.
“I won’t go into detail about the data on the Hezbollah capabilities [that the IDF has destroyed]. We have [this data], learning it. I will not detail it, to not endanger our intelligence and not to give the enemy clarity,” Hagari said.
“While this achievement is important… Hezbollah still has more capabilities of different kinds. Our job is to take care of each of them, but first of all, we are focusing on its strategic capabilities that pose a greater risk to the Israeli home front,” he added.
Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks, claiming they were fired at several military bases and airfields. It also claimed an attack on the northern town of Gesher Haziv.
It said launches had targeted a military supplies factory 60 kilometers (37 miles) into Israel with the “Fadi” series of rockets and that it also targeted the Megiddo airfield three separate times overnight. The airfield is mainly used for civilian purposes.
IDF hits back
The IDF said it carried out several waves of strikes on Tuesday, targeting Hezbollah sites in the Beqaa Valley and in the south of the country.
According to the military, the strikes targeted buildings where Hezbollah stored weapons, command rooms, and other infrastructure.
It said that secondary blasts can be seen in footage following the strikes, “which indicate that many weapons were stored in the buildings.”
מטוסי קרב השלימו כעת גל תקיפה שני החל משעות הבוקר.
בהכוונת פיקוד הצפון ואגף המודיעין, חיל האוויר תקף מטרות טרור של חיזבאללה בבקעא שבעומק לבנון ובמרחבים נוספים בדרום לבנון, בהן מבנים בהם אוחסנו אמצעי לחימה, מפקדות ותשתיות צבאיות נוספות>> pic.twitter.com/JdH02LOIVZ— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) September 24, 2024
On a Reuters live feed of the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, what appeared to be at least two rockets could be seen launching into the air erratically after a strike on a building.
The IDF said it was continuing to strike Hezbollah targets in an effort to destroy the terror group’s capabilities. It noted that it had bombed the Hezbollah cell that fired rockets at the Afula area overnight, destroying the launchers.
צה"ל תקף את חוליית המחבלים שירתה לעבר מרחב עפולה והעמקים במהלך הלילה ותקף את המשגרים>> pic.twitter.com/anSNgXK9Do
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) September 24, 2024
A senior Israeli Air Force officer said the airstrikes carried out over the past day against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon were the most extensive the IAF has carried out in its history.
More than 1,600 Hezbollah sites, mostly homes where weapons were stored, were struck in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley within a day, according to the IDF.
The senior IAF officer said the widespread airstrikes were “changing the operational situation in the north, changing the reality.”
He said Hezbollah had two main capabilities that it built up over decades: the elite Radwan Force and its arsenal of rockets, missiles, and drones. The top leadership of the Radwan Force, tasked with invading Israel, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. Hezbollah’s rocket and drone capabilities have been targeted across Lebanon in the past day.
The official said the IAF is working to strike “all of their rocket capabilities, all of them” and that it is “very determined” to do so.
Hezbollah still has rocket capabilities, but they have been harmed significantly in the recent strikes, the official said.
The official said the IAF has worked to prevent civilian harm in the widespread strikes, and that mitigating harm to civilians is a significant part of its offensive plans. The IDF issued warnings to civilians to leave homes where Hezbollah had stored weapons, hours before launching the strikes.
The official said Hezbollah has endangered Lebanese civilians twofold: first by placing the weapons in their homes, and second by telling civilians to ignore the IDF’s evacuation calls, he says.
The IDF has also assessed that many Hezbollah operatives are among the dead reported in Lebanon.
On Tuesday, the military issued new warnings to Lebanese civilians in villages where Hezbollah has stored munitions in homes, after similar warnings the previous day, saying that airstrikes against the terror group would continue.
“If you are near or in Hezbollah buildings or those used by it to store weapons, you must move away from those buildings at least one kilometer away or outside the village, immediately,” Col. Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on X.
“Anyone who is around Hezbollah elements is putting themselves in danger,” he added.
Photos and videos on social media showed south and east Lebanon residents continuing to flee the fighting amid a mass exodus over the past few days. Images showed gridlocked traffic in a number of areas.
In Israel, the IDF Home Front Command changed its instructions for a number of communities, and schools were closed in some towns. There were to be no in-person educational activities in the Megido area, Yokne’am Illit, Daliyat al-Karmel, and Isfiya. The Home Front Command had already canceled schools in communities from Haifa northwards.
International consternation
Calls from across the globe urged an end to the fighting.
The escalation between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah is almost a full-fledged war, the European Union’s foreign policy chief said.
“If this is not a war situation, I don’t know what you would call it,” Josef Borrell told reporters, citing the alleged high number of civilian casualties.
The UN human rights chief urged intervention to stave off any further escalation in the hostilities, voicing alarm.
“UN High Commissioner Volker Türk calls on all states and actors with influence in the region and beyond to avert further escalation and do everything they can to ensure full respect for international law,” a spokesperson for Turk said at a Geneva press briefing.
Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in Lebanon, the UN said, calling events “extremely alarming.”
“We are gravely concerned about the serious escalation in the attacks that we saw yesterday,” UN refugee agency spokesman Matthew Saltmarsh told reporters in Geneva.
“Tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes yesterday and overnight, and the numbers continue to grow,” he said. “This is a region that has already been devastated by war and a country that knows suffering all too well.”
He pointed out that even before the airstrikes, there had been significant displacement from southern Lebanon.
“The situation is extremely alarming. It is very chaotic,” he said. “The toll on civilians is unacceptable.”
Some 500 people have crossed from Lebanon to war-torn Syria, a Syrian security official told AFP.
“Around 500 people crossed the border through the Qusayr and Dabousiya crossings between 4 pm (1300 GMT) and midnight” Monday, the security official told AFP, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The foreign ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies warned that the situation in the Middle East risked dragging the region into a broader conflict that no country would gain from.
“Actions and counter-reactions risk magnifying this dangerous spiral of violence and dragging the entire Middle East into a broader regional conflict with unimaginable consequences,” the G7 said in a statement after meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
It called for “a stop to the current destructive cycle, while emphasizing that no country stands to gain from a further escalation in the Middle East.”
Russia said Israeli strikes on Lebanon could completely destabilize the oil-producing Middle East.
China’s top diplomat Wang Yi expressed support for Lebanon and condemned what he termed “indiscriminate attacks against civilians,” Beijing’s foreign ministry said.
Meeting his counterpart in New York, Wang said: “We pay close attention to developments in the region, especially the recent explosion of communications equipment in Lebanon, and firmly oppose indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”
While some Hebrew-language media outlets reported Monday that Israeli defense officials assessed that 50 percent of Hezbollah’s rocket capabilities were destroyed in that day’s strikes in Lebanon, military sources told The Times of Israel Tuesday that those figures were likely exaggerated.
The IDF said it targeted some 1,600 Hezbollah sites in Lebanon on Monday, largely striking homes where the terror group stored munitions.
The military has said the munitions included cruise missiles, short-range heavy rockets, medium-range rockets, and explosive drones. Notably, the IDF has not yet said it has destroyed Hezbollah’s long-range rockets and precision-guided missiles.
According to official IDF assessments from before the war began last October, Hezbollah had over 200,000 rockets, mortars, and missiles. The numbers include 400 long-range rockets, hundreds of precision-guided missiles, 4,800 medium-range rockets, 65,000 short-range rockets, and 140,000 mortars.
Also according to the assessments, Hezbollah has hundreds of explosive-laden drones, around 100 anti-ship missiles, and at least 17 anti-aircraft systems.
Hezbollah has already launched over 8,000 rockets and hundreds of drones at northern Israel amid the fighting in the past 11 months.
Israel has vowed to push Hezbollah back from the border so its displaced citizens can return to their homes, saying it preferred to do so diplomatically but was willing to use force. Hezbollah has said it will keep up its attacks until there is a ceasefire in Gaza, but that appears increasingly elusive as the war against Hamas nears its anniversary.