Beirut: Israel has killed several top Hezbollah commanders in a series of targeted strikes on the Iran-backed movement’s stronghold in Beirut.
Here is what we know about the slain commanders.
A strike on July 30 killed Fuad Shukr, the group’s top military commander and one of Israel’s most high-profile targets.
Shukr, who was in his early 60s, played a key role in cross-border clashes with Israeli forces, according to a source close to Hezbollah.
The two sides have traded near-daily fire across the frontier since Hezbollah ally Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel.
Shukr helped found Hezbollah during Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war and became a key adviser to its chief, Hassan Nasrallah.
Shukr was Hezbollah’s most senior military commander, and Nasrallah said he had been in daily contact with him since October.
Israel blamed Shukr for a rocket attack in July on the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights that killed 12 children in a Druze Arab town. Hezbollah has denied responsibility.
In 2017, the US Treasury offered a $5 million reward for information on Shukr, saying he had “a central role” in the deadly 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
A strike on September 20 killed Ibrahim Aqil, head of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, along with 15 other commanders.
According to Lebanese officials, the attack killed a total of 55 people, many of them civilians.
A source close to Hezbollah described Aqil as the second-in-command in the group’s forces after Shukr.
The Radwan Force is Hezbollah’s most formidable offensive unit and its fighters are trained in cross-border infiltration, a source close to the group told AFP.
The United States said Aqil was a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, the movement’s highest military body.
The US Treasury said he was a “principal member” of the Islamic Jihad Organization — a Hezbollah-linked group behind the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and an attack on US Marine Corps in the Lebanese capital the same year that killed 241 American soldiers.
On September 25, a strike killed Ibrahim Mohammed Kobeissi, who commanded several military units including a guided missiles unit.
“Kobeissi was an important source of knowledge in the field of missiles and had close ties with senior Hezbollah military leaders,” the Israeli military said.
Kobeissi joined Hezbollah in 1982 and rose through the ranks of the group’s forces.
One of the units he led was tasked with manning operations in part of the south of Lebanon, which borders Israel.
A strike on September 26 killed Mohammed Srur, the head of Hezbollah’s drone unit since 2020.
Srur studied mathematics and was among a number of top advisers sent by Hezbollah to Yemen to train the country’s Houthi rebels, who are also backed by Iran, a source close to Hezbollah said.
He had also played a key role in Hezbollah’s intervention since 2013 in Syria’s civil war in support of President Bashar Assad’s government.
Hezbollah will hold a funeral ceremony for Srur on Friday.
Other commanders killed in recent strikes include Wissam Tawil and Mohammed Naameh Nasser.
The Hezbollah commanders killed in Israeli strikes
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The Hezbollah commanders killed in Israeli strikes
- Here is what we know about the slain commanders
Beirut soup kitchen struggles to keep up as Israeli strikes intensify
- Beirut soup kitchen struggles with demand from displaced people
- Nation Station kitchen working at maximum capacity, founder says
Josephine Abu Abdo, a chef and one of the founders of Nation Station, said the kitchen is serving 700 meals a day and is at maximum capacity, but she then hears 1,000 meals are needed.
“The challenge is that we can’t keep up. We feel like we are just a drop in the ocean,” Abu Abdo said, while a team of volunteers of different ages from all over Lebanon hurriedly packaged up food.
Nation Station was founded to help victims of the devastating 2020 Beirut port explosion, growing from a team of five to a hundred over time. It serves some traditional Lebanese dishes, such as zucchini stuffed with rice and meat, bulgur and tomato, vegetable soup and cabbage salad.
When the Israeli strikes across Lebanon intensified on Monday, forcing around 40,000 into shelters within days, the volunteers cooked more food without any funding, distributing it as an emergency response to the centers housing the displaced.
“We worked from the small savings that we had for the first three days. Then, many people started donating,” Abu Abdo said.
“The donation that we receive will cover us for two or three days. We will see, one day at a time and we will make a decision,” she added.
Israeli attacks have killed more than 600 people in Lebanon since Monday, with the conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah at its most intense in more than 18 years.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel for almost a year in support of its ally Hamas, which is fighting Israel in Gaza.
Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have fled their homes and Israel has declared the safe return of its residents as one of its war aims.
“We are all trying our hardest to make a little bit of a difference and to help out. It’s like the least we can do and unfortunately we are used to this,” May Ayash, a professional chef who volunteers at the kitchen said.
Tunisia assembly votes on electoral bill nine days before poll, opposition calls protest
- Bill strips Administrative Court of authority over electoral disputes
- Opposition and civil society groups call for protests near parliament
TUNIS: Tunisia’s parliament was set to vote on a major amendment to the electoral law on Friday, nine days before a presidential election that opposition groups fear will cement President Kais Saied’s authoritarian rule. The bill strips the Administrative Court of its authority to adjudicate electoral disputes. It is likely to pass in an assembly elected in 2022 on an 11 percent turnout after Saied dissolved the previous one and prompted an opposition boycott.
Political opposition and civil society groups called for protests against the bill near parliament.
The Administrative Court is widely seen as the last independent judicial body, after Saied dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council and dismissed dozens of judges in 2022. The court this month ordered the electoral commission to reinstate disqualified presidential candidates, saying the legitimacy of the Oct. 6 election was in question. But the commission defied the court and has allowed only two candidates to run against Saied.
Lawmakers said they had proposed the bill because they believed the Administrative Court was no longer neutral and could annul the election and plunge Tunisia into chaos and a constitutional vacuum.
Critics argue that Saied is using the electoral commission and the judiciary to secure victory by stifling competition and intimidating rivals. He for his part says he is fighting traitors, mercenaries and corruption.
Saied was democratically elected in 2019, but then tightened his grip on power and began ruling by decree in 2021 in a move the opposition has described as a coup. Presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel was sentenced last week to 20 months in prison on charges of falsifying popular endorsements, and to a further six months on Wednesday on charges of falsifying documents.
Abir Moussi, leader of the Free Constitutional Party, has been imprisoned since last year on charges of harming public security. Another prominent politician, Lotfi Mraihi, was jailed this year on charges of vote-buying in 2019.
Both had said they would run in October, but were prevented from submitting their applications from jail.
Another court jailed four other potential candidates in August and gave them lifetime bans from running for office.
Over 30,000 crossed into Syria from Lebanon in past days, says UN
- About 80 percent of those crossings are Syrians and about 20 percent are Lebanese
About 80 percent of those crossings are Syrians and about 20 percent are Lebanese, said the UNHCR representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, adding that about half are children and adolescents, and that men are making the crossing in smaller numbers than women.
“They are crossing from a country at war to one that has faced a crisis conflict for 13 years,” an extremely difficult choice, he told a news conference.
“We will have to see over the next few days how many more do so,” added the representative.
Unions file ILO complaint over Israel’s treatment of Palestinian workers since Gaza war
- Complaint addresses exclusion of 200,000 Palestinian workers
- Unions claim unpaid wages and compensation at ILO
GENEVA: A group of 10 global trade unions filed a complaint on Friday against Israel with the International Labour Organization, alleging that its treatment of Palestinian workers since the Gaza war began had breached a global treaty.
Criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian workers, under scrutiny for decades, has increased at the Geneva-based UN labor body since the war started on Oct. 7.
The complaint summarised in a statement sent to journalists focuses on Israel’s exclusion of some 200,000 Palestinian migrant workers, which Israel justifies on security grounds. It claims unpaid wages and other compensation for them and other Palestinian workers which the unions say could amount to billions of dollars.
“The sudden unemployment of Palestinians working in Israel has left hundreds of thousands destitute,” said Stephen Cotton, general secretary of the London-based International Transport Workers’ Federation, one of the unions that signed the complaint.
“Israel must comply with its international legal obligations and ensure these workers receive their owed wages immediately,” Cotton said.
Israel has blamed its treatment of Palestinian workers from Israel on Hamas, saying the militant group had targeted commuter routes on and after the Oct. 7 attacks in which 1,200 people were killed and over 250 taken hostage.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has since killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis.
The trade unions who filed the complaint say they represent some 207 million workers in over 160 countries across a range of sectors including catering, agriculture and industry.
Other trade union groups signing onto the complaint include Education International and the Building and Wood Workers’ International.
The groups allege violations of the 1949 Protection of Wages Convention which Israel has ratified along with around 100 other countries, according to the UN agency’s website.
Under ILO rules, the body can set up a so-called tripartite committee composed of government and employers’ and workers’ groups to examine alleged violations of the convention. This could eventually lead to an investigation and even sanctions, as occurred in Myanmar in the 1990s.
Israel strike kills 5 Syrian soldiers near Lebanon: state media
- The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Israeli warplanes targeted a crossing that links Syria’s Qusayr area to Lebanon
Damascus: An Israeli air strike on Friday killed five Syrian soldiers near the border with Lebanon, the official news agency SANA reported, citing a military source.
“The Israeli enemy carried out an aerial attack... on one of our military positions near Kfar Yabus on the Syrian-Lebanese border,” SANA quoted the source as saying, adding that five Syrian soldiers were killed and one was wounded.
The raid came a day after the Israeli army said its warplanes struck “infrastructure along the Syria-Lebanon border used by Hezbollah to transfer weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Israeli warplanes targeted a crossing that links Syria’s Qusayr area to Lebanon, causing “a number of wounded.”
The Britain-based monitor, which relies on a network of sources on the ground, said it was the first such strike on Syria since Israel intensified its attacks on Lebanon’s Hezbollah this week.
