Israel kills Hezbollah media chief – AP
Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif has been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut, a member of the Lebanese paramilitary group has told the Associated Press. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not commented on the strike.
Israeli jets struck central Beirut without warning on Sunday, killing multiple people at a local office of the Syrian Ba'ath Party. Afif was among the dead, a Hezbollah official told AP.
The strike took place near a busy intersection, and an AP reporter on the scene counted at least four bodies in the street afterwards.
The IDF did not respond to requests for comment from Israeli or international media outlets. Neither did it issue an evacuation order before the attack, as it sometimes does before striking densely-populated areas. The IDF has bombed the Lebanese capital dozens of times while conducting an incursion into the country in an attempt to wipe out the Hezbollah militant group.
Afif ran Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station for years before taking over as the group’s spokesman. He delivered regular press conferences from the bombed-out ruins of Beirut’s Dahiyeh neighborhood following the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, and issued a statement taking responsibility for a drone attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence the following month.
Afif is the latest in a long line of senior Hezbollah officials killed by Israel since the IDF began striking Beirut in mid-September. Israeli ground troops pushed into southern Lebanon in early October, although Hezbollah fighters have put up stiff resistance, with Afif declaring last week that the group was preparing to wage a “long war” against Israeli forces.
The IDF has confirmed the deaths of nearly 50 of its soldiers in the ground operation, although Hezbollah claims that the true body count is far higher.
IDF airstrikes have killed over 3,400 people in Lebanon since the airstrikes began in September, according to the country’s health ministry. This figure does not differentiate between civilians and Hezbollah militants.
Israel carried out a separate wave of airstrikes in Dahiyeh earlier on Sunday. Unlike the strike in central Beirut, the IDF issued an evacuation order before attacking Dahiyeh, a suburb on the south side of the Lebanese capital and a traditional stronghold of Hezbollah. The IDF claims to have hit at least 50 Hezbollah sites in the area over the last week.
